Years ago I had my foot in the door of a computer company that was on the brink of becoming the world standard – Apple, Inc. I was in the office as a call center rep at the time, young and in college and selling to educators, universities and other college kids – easy for them to relate to me = pretty easy sales for me.  Being in the rising computer industry early, I quickly learned what a megabyte was, read my MAC bible cover to cover and learned every Easter egg hidden in my Performa 6300. OH we also had a ton of fun with our ONE THOUSAND dollar flat bed scanner aging people in Photoshop…….1.0.  I was seriously born in the perfect year.  Young enough to get in on this technological transition with ease, but old enough to appreciate everything BEFORE the internet ====GASP!!  “She’s OLDER than the internet?!?!?”  Yes, but the internet is really not THAT old, and neither am I. Unless you talk to Al Gore and he tells you he invented the internet as a toddler or something. I digress…

I say we, because while I was working at Apple, Steve was in school studying fine art (SHOCKER) and perfecting his painting and drawing talents as a graphic artist. Not that he needed to with his ridiculous raw talent. All while swinging a hammer and carrying beams building houses and working in construction. He had NO idea what a computer did other than the fact that he had to call MacWarehouse to buy ZIP disks that held his latest artwork.  When his construction job ended, he joined me in corporate land at Apple, (we actually shared a cubicle wall for a while) and he slowly began to learn the lingo.   We actually had to sit in on a demo meeting with our Vice President discussing, “This is the world wide web”.  Yes, it was that long ago.

Fast-forward to today and now HE’s hollering at ME that I don’t “get it” and stop “CLICKING on everything so fast”.

See, when I left the cubicle life, I no longer needed that info and therefore deleted all of that particular knowledge from my brain.  Why?  Because Steve picked it up so quickly and became the computer wiz aka “IT Guy” guy that he is today.   I no longer needed to know how to config my IP nor did I ever want to worry about why my SyQuest disk was not responding.  I didn’t care. I was too busy looking at pictures of waterfalls in Costa Rica on my eWorld dial up planning our future vacations.  And it worked for us.  Well for a while.

Now… I dream up super strange technical requests and somehow….poof….he makes them happen.  Oh there is resistance, such as “babe….that doesn’t exist in this world” or “no normal person would ever want that”.  Like I said, ‘resistance’.  But somehow we both realize that we are on to something and that gets both of our creative juices flowing.  He says I “challenge” him to push himself.  I’m sure what he really wants to say is that I’m a pain in the a$$, but who really needs that kind of clarification anyway?!

Yes we can make cool stuff together, but that is usually an uphill climb that I think we are both working on.  It seems our communication needs some tweaking when we talk shop from different departments.  Recent Example:

Me:  Did you finish moving all of my data from my computer (to the new one)?

Hubs:  Yes

Me:  GREAT!  Can’t wait to start using it!

Me starting to use…..only to find about half of my ‘stuff’ there.

Me:  I thought you said the data was finished?

Hubs: Yes it is.

Me:  But half of my ‘stuff’ isn’t there.  Where did it go?

Hubs:  It’s on the (INSERT COMPLICATED I-DON’T- KNOW- WHAT- HE’S- TALKING ABOUT- COMPUTER- LINGO HERE).    Didn’t you see that?

Me: Uhhhhh………?  Wha?  (Starting to click on stuff I’m not supposed to)

Hubs:  DON’T CLICK ON THAT

Me: Uhhhhh………?  Wha?  (Clicking faster)

Hubs:  If you (INSERT LINGO ABOUT WHY I SHOULDN’T CLICK ON THAT IN TECHNICAL TERMS HERE)

Blue screen

Me: Uhhhhh………?  Whoops?

INSERT #$%&^% HERE

Besides me being click happy, he was trying to speak to me in a language I no longer understand.  Communication miss. He wants me to really get it, so he explains it………….in detail…….….very…….thoroughly.  I figure I’m on a need to know basis, and I just don’t need to know.  Right?

But like I said, we’re working on it. We each have our strengths and even though we know how to speak each other’s love language and communicate very effectively there, but after 18 years together we still haven’t conquered speaking each other’s technoid language.   Even when we want to fire each other like Donald Trump with each project we tackle, we both find working together extremely rewarding and precious and therefore we keep going back for more.

Someday when we’re old and wrinkly, you’ll be visiting our breakfast café where Steve will be cooking up some eggs and bacon as I pour you some coffee and serve you some homemade apple pie. Or maybe you’ll see Steve’s line of guitars he’s handcrafted from his future Luthier’s workshop, with gallery walls decorated with photographs I’ve taken throughout our life.  We’ll be in the showroom pimping them all out ……and serving you some homemade apple pie.  What a shop THAT will be!

Just don’t ask us to do a major home improvement project together. We have found our limits and prefer being married instead. 😛

And in case you were wondering, we both, very unfortunately, sold our vested Apple employee stock options long ago. Hey – a few grand seemed like a billion dollars at 21 years old!  I tried not to do the math and figure out what they’d be worth today. I said tried. I totally failed and it’s really depressing. (100 shares each in 1996). But it’s fine, it actually helped in buying our first home a year later.  It could have paid for our second home, in cash, plus put both our kids through college, but hey – you can’t predict the future.

If you have a story on working with your spouse either in business together or a special project, I’d love to hear it. It may even be used for an upcoming project!