O’DAY’S TRAVEL WOES #31: My Mac & Me At 30,000 Feet

November, 1994: The entire NAB contingent was on the return flight from Amsterdam to Washington. I had planned to get some work done on my Macintosh Powerbook as we crossed the Atlantic.

Spotting the NAB’s John Abel a couple of rows behind me, I decided first to show him the nifty condenser microphone built into the Powerbook. John uses a PC, but he expressed interest in seeing what my Macintosh could do.

Mac PowerBook 180

Like most Macintosh owners, I’m always eager to evangelize on behalf of a computer that you can use intuitively. So I happily went to launch a particular application…and it crashed.

No problem, I told John, sheepishly. I’ll just restart, and everything will be fine.

It wouldn’t restart.

I tried again. Nothing.

And again. Nothing.

Only a Macintosh user can appreciate how frustrating this was.

So I took the computer back to my seat, promising to return. Finally I managed to get the thing started, and I returned to the empty seat next to John.

I demonstrated various nifty features of the computer, and after a couple of minutes another passenger leaned over us to look. And then another. Now I had an audience of three, as I demonstrated a silly program that creates anagrams out of people’s names (or out of any words). Naturally, we had to feed each person’s name into the program.

Finally everyone got tired of my bragging about my Mac, and I returned to my seat. I settled down to get some work done — pleased that my travel time would be used productively — and discovered that all of my showing off had used up the computer battery. (And I wonder why I never seem to get any work done while “on the road.”)