I work in a Corporate IT department, and for the past six months I have been the sole Macintosh engineer. Prior to that, I was one of two Macintosh engineers. I've been working on Macs since I was in college, which was a long, long time ago (and yes, in a galaxy far away - Oklahoma). But, this is a problem.
First, I've disavowed my technical abilities for a long time. When I was young, I simply didn't have the confidence; I fixed computers the way my brothers fixed their cars, and it was just a tool that I felt comfortable noodling around in. A guy who kinda like me when I was in college showed me how to crack open cases to clean out the innards, and I did that one summer in the lab. The next year, he suggested me as a replacement tech when he left the computer store he worked at. I just stumbled forward from there. Being a tech was my college job, which turned into my day job, which turned into my bad-economy job, which turned into my career.
Moreover, I grew up in an age when being a geek was not cool (apparently now, it is), and God knows, I always wanted to be cool. When I was younger, I would try to play of my geekiness ("oh that? nothing, you could do it as well if you had to, it's not complicated"), and now that I am older, I tend to be professional about it ("imagine if I started my career as a paralegal at a law firm, I wouldn't be raving about how certain frameworks for contract law are so much better than bankruptcy law"). Being a tech, being an engineer even, are just means to an end, that is, a way to make a living.
So at work, I'm the Mac girl. As far as we know, there are about 900 Macintoshes to the company's 27,000 Windows computers. That's just over 3%, and while I do the jobs of six Windows people for the Macintosh world, I get no real respect. For some of what we do, the number of machines I affect are a rounding error. So, needless to say, my career has stalled almost from the get-go.
Second, there's also a danger in being seen as, at worst a zealot and at best, parochial. One thing I know is that when you're a visible minority - a non-white in a mostly white firm, or a woman in a mostly male office - any other differences become exaggerated. So, whenever I talk about how a Macintosh works, I have to be careful to highlight how similar it is to a Windows machine, and smile and nod supportingly when my Windows counterparts describe the shortcomings of that operating system.
Thus, I go out of my way to be the non-Apple girl. I talk about how difficult Apple is to work with as a company. I joke about Steve Jobs' being Steve Jobs. I don't buy any iPhone when it first comes out, and I don't talk about tricking out my Mac at home. Other engineers are hacking their computers and media centers and Xboxes and Playstations at home. I read email, surf, and occasionally blog.
This is part of a distancing from the first bit above. I am actively trying to change careers. There was a time when my life was consumed by technology: I would come home from a long day installing video cards, updating operating systems, and configuring printers, and after dinner I would start plugging in cameras to my computer, installing software, and configuring network settings. I had to step away from it. Now, even ten years later, I seek to move further back. My iPhone really is just a phone, and I'm in no hurry to replace it, and I may very well replace it with a nice Android phone. I am considering replacing my Macbook with a netbook that I can just throw in a purse and go with.
But here's the final thing: I like Apple products. I think they're well made and I've taken enough business courses to know that you can't just base comparisons to competitors on price. However, I've also always been wary of cults, and fascism, and groupthink in general, and there is a lot of that in the Apple fanboy world. I think it's diluted some as computers in general have become more popular with consumer, and normal, less dogmatic people enter the pool. That said, I got sick of the politics a long time ago. It's just another way for guys to square off against one another ("Ford!" "Chevy!", or I guess "Mercedes!" "Volkswagon!").
So, hopefully, my Mac days will come to an end, at least in the sense of a single company's products providing my livelihood. I like being a subject matter expert, but truly I'd be just as happy to understand the finer points of antitrust regulation. It's just a job, it's not a way of life. Unfortunately, when you're locked into a world where technology is a way of life, the technology you use is seen as part of who you are.
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