Hello everyone! I am now on week two of avoiding my list of scheduled blog topics. I spent last night wondering whether or not I should write about our good friend Mister Bezos and how much he reminds me of Santa Claus, and I spent this morning playing with “new technology” that is so close to being amazing that I emailed a page of UI nitpicks and issues to the company that makes it. The unboxing and subsequent fiddling with my reMarkable 2 (which I shall Link To You With An Affiliate Code That You Will Not Click On) made it clear that I have something to write about this week.
I had a customer service experience this weekend that reminded me of the following quote:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke
The fan inside my computer’s power supply started making unfortunate noises in early December. The instant I need a new chunk of matter inside my house, my brain immediately envisions two scenarios:
The first scenario is where I get into my car and burn hideous amounts of fossil fuels that will murder the planet. In this scenario, I get into a toxic traffic situation, fighting car by car to get to a retail store. Because this is The Murica, this also means there is a non-zero chance that someone will smash into my bumper, get out of their car, and start shooting bullets in a fit of road rage. Methamphetamines are probably involved.
The second scenario is I open my browser, and Jeff Bezos personally instructs someone to bring it to my house within a single-digit number of hours, possibly even while I am sleeping. In this scenario, I am wearing one hundred percent cotton super comfortable jammies with a fresh cup of coffee in my hands. I hum pleasantly as I walk to the front door, open it to greet the day, collect my merchandise, and bring it blissfully back to the office.
My brain is funny sometimes.
This is, by the technical definition above, magic. Admittedly, the power supply never arrived. Amazon and I did a delicate dance of status updates, eventually bringing them to the point that the original power supply may have been lost. I was given a chance to cancel and reorder a different one, which I took.
Let’s fast forward to Friday. That power supply began making noises it should not make. Maybe the air quality of my home office has the particulate density of the desert world of Arrakis. Regardless, I went to Amazon and observed that I was within 30 days of the original purchase. I could easily click a button to return the device.
What happened next is also in the realm of magic.
The Amazon product return experience is at a “deliciousness of cocaine” level of magic. First, they ask if you want a replacement unit instead of a complete return. Second, they tell you when you will get the unit. Third, you get a week’s grace to return the product.
This is not even where the magic begins. If you have ever purchased a thing that needed to be RMA’ed to the manufacturer, you know that you generally have to pay the shipping cost, print out some labels, and do some kind of ritual involving Packing Tape. It is not fun.
When you buy something from Amazon, you can simply drop off the replaced unit in its packaging at a nearby store and scan a QR code. No packaging. No printing. No shipping fees.
Fucking. Magic.
When I stare at pictures of Santa Claus, I am reasonably convinced it is Jeff Bezos’s eyes staring back at me.
So yesterday my replacement power supply arrived. I replaced the noisy unit, put it into the box, walked into our local Whole Foods store, and finished the whole ordeal within minutes.
I will leave off the impulse purchases and random shopping we did at Whole Foods. I am sure there is some money-math that factors into this service. I am happy to spend twenty dollars at the Whole Foods store on cookies and snacks instead of shipping costs.
I would tell a different story if I purchased a replacement power supply from anywhere else and it went bad. It would be a sad and frustrating story. There would be no cookies and snacks.
Which brings us to my “reMarkable 2”. This product is painfully close to magic. I am looking for a good tool that lets me easily transform information in my brain into electronic format. Some of this information is in text format. Some of this is diagrams and images. I have experimented with dictation and with other devices like the Wacom Tablet. This is the next step in my information transformation journey.
Two hours into fiddle-faddling with my reMarkable, I had a page of notes and a couple of screenshots I sent to the company that makes this… well… remarkable… device. They are close enough to creating magic that they need to be informed of just how close they are.
I also included the concession that some of what I would like is an advanced mode for professionals. I even conceded that I would pay a larger subscription for those kinds of features.
We have reached the end of our journey today. We have talked about the magic of Jeff Bezos. We have talked about the near-magic of reMarkable.
As a bonus, let’s bring it home to our January job hunters.
If you ever created magic at work, you should talk about that in your interviews. You can even sound smarter by quoting Arthur C. Clarke above before you launch into your amazing tale of magic creation. I have created magic a few times in my career. Most recently, I have created an integrated spreadsheet-to-game-data integration that lets a game designer, with a click of a button, take pages and pages of Excel-originated tables and upload them to a website where it is stored into a versioned database. Someone else can open a Unity editor and fire up their game, and that data will magically appear in the game in real-time for testing and development purposes. The last team to use this system had an entry-level designer iterate over 150 times on game content without an engineer getting involved because something in the pipeline was busted.
The handful of times I have told this story to designers and producers, you can see the hunger in their stares. The ability to quickly iterate on a game while you are finding the fun is challenging. When it is this frictionless, that’s right, it is indistinguishable from magic.
Stories like this will help you turn your interview into an offer.
See you all next week!
