I love when the universe gives weird and fun little gifts. Like the time I got a letter in the mail addressed to “Scott Scott.” Or how the back of this glass “Museum” sign almost looks like it says Museum:
Do these kinds of things happen more often to me than to most folks, or am I just easily amused?
In a similar way, I notice odd words and phrases about myself. Some are cool and some are strange. Some happened to me and some are self-inflicted. Like these:
This one came from the book The Macintosh Way by Guy Kawasaki, my buddy and former boss. With this description, Guy neatly points out that I helped programmers without actually being one myself.
I came up with this one myself when I realized how lucky I was to be at Apple when the Mac was getting started, and at General Magic when it was happening, and at Google when it was the place to be, etc., all without being an engineer, the superstars of those places and times. Amazing, sometimes historic things were going on, and I got to watch from up close.
In 2019 I was in a play about Gandhi at the renowned Naatak theatre company. I was one of a few non-Indians in the cast, and I got to play a bunch of different characters: various Brits, South Africans, and even Lord Mountbatten. Our company was featured in an episode of the NPR show All Things Considered. The reporter interviewed me and, noting that I played lots of non-Indians, gave me the awesome nickname “all-purpose white guy.”
“Cute and humorous”
I gave a Google campus tour in 2017 to a group of University of California students from China. They all wrote about the visit for class and one wrote "It is said that people who work on technology are usually serious and short-spoken, but Scott is cute and humorous." How nice is that?
Milo Colon
This one might be too much information, but what the heck. Older readers know about colonoscopy, a medical procedure mainly used to screen for colon cancer. This test is routine for older adults in much of the world. The first time I had a colonoscopy, I was fine, but the doctor found that my colon had “excessive looping”. Even better than being called loopy, his notes said “This guy’s colon is a mile long!” Based on that, I gave myself a new nickname: Milo Colon. And of course it’s pronounced Mee-lo Kuh-loan.
InfoWorld magazine and specifically Robert X. Cringely’s column bestowed this on me in an item about the founding of Acius, a startup company. I was 27 at the time, so probably not a kid anymore. And a whiz? Debatable. But I collected another fun description.
“I’ve had a weird shit life.”
In The Sandman, the character Rose Walker says "I don't believe in magic, but I believe in weird shit. I've had a weird shit life." My life hasn’t been nearly as weird as Rose’s, but I identify with this comment. Working in Silicon Valley from the 1980s to the 2020s was plenty weird enough for me.
A 1997 article in Salon called me “a cult figure in the world of the Apple faithful.” I love both parts of this phrase: being a “cult figure” sounds wacky, and “the world of the Apple faithful” I think would be a fun planet to live on. Or maybe I already do.
Occasionally misses expectations
This one is a score in a now-obsolete Google performance review system. Silicon Valley loves its performance reviews, especially Google. I think “Occasionally misses expectations” would be a C or D on a more conventional A-B-C-D-F scale, except that the grades and groupings are highly massaged and manipulated, so maybe it’s really a D or F? I was never a manager at Google, but I was often a management problem. I never learned exactly how these things worked, and I definitely received this grade more than once. I decided “Occasionally misses expectations” is a good self-deprecating way to refer to my career.
“From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!”
You’ll recognize this one if you know Dr. Seuss. I grew up reading Dr. Seuss, as did my kids, as I hope my grandkids will. This book was published when I was 2 1/2 months old, like it was just waiting for me to be old enough to see it. It’s my favorite. This quote probably sank in deep and it’s still there. To me it means: watch closely and don’t take yourself too seriously. Words to live by.
Milo Colon 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I collected a few "Occasionally misses expectations" myself. These were invariably preceded by a question from whichever manager I was reporting to at the time, along the lines of "Do you think you've performed well this quarter?" I learned after a while that this was a kind of code.