Badge Replacement Day

Today I went and got my new Apple badge, pictured here for your convenience. You can compare it to my old badge.

A year and a half ago Apple started replacing the old badges with new, thinner ones. However, the designs on those badges were astonishingly ugly. Fortunately, I delayed long enough that they cancelled the program before I went down. I heard two rumors about why the program was cancelled: First, that Steve saw the design and thought it was godawful ugly (which it was) and put a stop to it. Second, that the organization of the re-badging effort was so poorly organized that highly-paid executives were wasting an hour or more waiting in line to get a new badge.

I have no idea if either of these is true, although I'm a little more inclined to believe the former than the latter, since the new badge design this year is different (and better) than last year's, and since it shouldn't take them a year and a half to solve logistical problems.

Why they wouldn't let us keep our old badges, I don't know.

Anyway, they used digital cameras and iMacs to take our photos, and gave us six shots to choose from. None of mine were stellar, but this one is okay. As you can see, I've shaved off my beard entirely. Back to "Rawdon standard" as I put it (or "looking like more of a goober", as John puts it). A lot of people got clowning-around photos for their badges. Subrata's has him reading a book. I'm so vanilla.

We each get an Apple of a color determined by the last digit of our employee ID. I got exactly the color I wanted. John got orange. Nyah-nyah!

(By the way, Trish wrote an entry about the new badges with some additional information I didn't have.)