I was working as a contractor at Apple Computer in the tools division in
Karl Jensen's group. My job title was Quality Engineer. I live in El Sobrante,
which happens to be a 62 mile commute to Cupertino, where Apple has its world
headquarters. I would get up at 4 AM, which usually meant that I could leave
the house by 5 AM, and when I did so I could make the drive in 65 minutes,
arriving in Cupertino at 6 AM or so.

Since usually I would get to bed by 11 PM or midnight, I would crawl into the
back seat of my car for a nap until 8 or 9 AM. Sometimes in the conference room.

Karl scheduled what was called an offsite, a team building exercise, whereby the
group members would get together for some activity. This particular exercise was
to be a pool tournament at one of the local pool halls on Stevens Creek Boulevard.

On this particular day, because of the tournament in the evening I skipped my nap
in the morning so that I could be finished with my work for the day by the time
the event was scheduled. So at 5 PM I had been awake for 13 hours on four hours
sleep and to be fresh for the tournament I slipped into the conference room for
a twenty minute nap which would carry me until 9 or 10 PM.

Often I would stay until 8 PM, and when I left Cupertino at this hour I would miss
the commute traffic in the evening as well.

After I had been asleep for 15 minues or so some of my coworkers found the need to
use the conference room and I was discovered. I proceeded to the offsite,
participated in the pool tournament. As was often the case I would get 30 miles
down the road, get so drowsy that I was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel,
and I would pull over at a convenient offramp and catch a half hour nap, then
continue home.

Next morning Karl came to my cubicle and asked me to accompany him to his cubicle,
where he confronted me with the facts of my discovery the evening before.

I have a disability, which manifests itself mainly in my mannerisms. I have most
of the time an expressionless face, and I don't smile much. I also don't talk
very much or very well, I am quiet. I had told Karl earlier that I had difficulty
talking.

Karl said something to the effect that I had been discovered napping in the
conference room. I said "Yea, I do that". I proceeded to explain as I did above my
schedule in the morning. Before I could get to the part about how that particular
days schedule had been he broke in and said that the incident was in the afternoon.
So he was backing me into a corner, a conclusion I formed in retrospect. Not knowing
what to say I said nothing, and just looked at him. After a moment he lost his
composure and stared at my crotch, which, if you don't know, is body language for
submission. I said to myself upon seeing this body language literaly "Oh fuck"
I waited for him to regain his composure, which he did, and he went on to explain
that Apple knew that some engineers had a need to take naps during the day and had
a designated place for such activity, or non-activity as you will, and he showed
me the room where engineers went for naps during the day. I used that room
subsequently. In subsequent meetings Karl then sometimes had the body language of
a scared little kid. I tried to change the way I interacted with Karl to the extent
that when I saw Karl I would smile and say hello, but I'm not sure that I didn't
just make the situation worse. Without wanting to or trying to I intimidated the
fellow who signs my paycheck.(significance of this)

The day after the incident, Esmond Lewis, another engineer in the group and part of
the group of engineers that was on the interview committee that hired me, and the
defacto immediate suppervisor, came into my cubicle and said that my work
assignment had changed and that he wished me to demonstrate some form of
competancy in regard to the focus of the work group, and that to do so I should
write some code that would, for example control the LED's on the Apple Extended
Keyboard. I intrepeted this as Karl increasing the job pressure on me as a result
of being intimidated by me. I also saw it as a challenge, which I welcomed, as the
work that I had been doing in the previous 8 weeks had not been particularly
challenging.

The Apple Extended Keyboard has three LED's(Light Emmitting Diodes) in its upper
right corner, labeled num lock, caps lock and scroll lock. Each light has, of
course, two states, on and off. This allows for an octal display. With three
lights there are eight possible combinations of the states of the lights, hence
octal. In a couple of days I wrote an application that had a menu whose menu
items were the numbers 0 through 7. So with the mouse I could and did, move
the cursor to the menu in the menu bar, clicked the mouse button, and dragged
down to one of the numbers that were the menu items, released the mouse button,
and the state of the LED's on the keyboard woud change to correspond to a display
in octal of the number selected in the menu. I also enabled the command-key
equivalents, so that I could hold down the command key(cloverleaf pattern) and
strike the number keys from 0 to 7 and that state would then be represented in
octal in the LED's. I called Esmond into my cube to demonstrate this little ap,
which I called "Skanky Lights", and the expression on his face was one of
amazement.

I produced the next version of this ap, which I called Dorky Lights

Update 20080121: In April of 2000 I worked for 90 days as a contractor at Apple as a Systems Test Enginer, me having in the meantime studied UNIX, and