Usually, employees can't wait to leave work after a long day of work, and those who are fired don't want to return to the company to work for free on projects already started. Contrary to the mentality of most employees, a former employee of the Apple company since 1993 sneaked into the Apple campus in Cupertino to finish a project started a few months ago. It all started when those at Apple considered that a PowerPC project was not good enough to be worth finishing and decided to end it and relocate the employees who worked on it. All those who worked on that project were sent to other departments, but the head of the project, Ron Avitzur, refused to make the change and his manager decided to pay him the rest of the contract and fire him. Avitzur was supposed to send a notice to conclude the contract and receive the payment, but he believed so much in his project that he decided not to send the notice, to keep his contract active and remain with access to the Apple campus where he would finish the program for PowerPC.
Ron Avitzur knew his project was doomed. By the time his bosses cut the cord in August 1993, his team was actually relieved. The graphing calculator program they'd been working on for new mobile devices had finally been shelved, and they could all move on. Most of his fellow programmers were reassigned to other projects within Apple. The company offered Avitzur a job, too, but it didn't interest him. …Avitzur wanted to make the graphing calculator work on the new PowerPC computer that Apple planned to ship in early 1994. The program could simultaneously showcase the speed of the new machine and revolutionize math class. All he needed was access to Apple's machines and some time.
Keeping his Apple customer ID active, he convinced an engineer friend to continue working on the project, but without the company's managers knowing. For a certain period of time the plan worked, he received help from other Apple engineers and managed to make important progress in the development of the software, but one fine day an Apple manager found out everything the employees were doing and decided to cancel their legitimacy. Of course, that didn't stop the two from working on the process, it just made everything much more "interesting" because now they had to sneak into Apple to finish the project.
They worked in tandem for about a month. Robbins, the perfectionist, spent days tweaking the grayscale of a single pixel. Avitzur, the big picture guy, was more social. He chatted with fellow engineers, seeking advice and mulling solutions. Avitzur's and Robbins's presence was an open secret; people admired their passion and believed in the project. Then Avitzur got careless. He told the story to the wrong person—a manager who had come to tell him he needed to move offices. That's when the real sneaking around began. For the next two months, Avitzur had to find new ways of getting into the building. He kept his canceled badge around his neck and timed his arrival for when he knew there'd be crowds coming through the front door.
For several months, the two sneaked inside Apple, were further helped by the company's engineers, and finally managed to finish the program. It was presented to Apple managers and in 1994 it was included in the company's PowerPC, and since then it has been installed on over 20 million computers. Of course, no one knows how real this story is, but if there is at least a grain of truth there, then Ron Avitzur was probably one of the most dedicated Apple employees.
