(I don’t really write posts that aren’t tech-related, but this one sort of peeks around the edge of that personal rule.)
Two days ago, I read a brief note in the New York Times and discovered that David Lerner – one of the founders of the legendary Manhattan Apple repair outfit Tekserve – had passed away at the age of 72. The article was brief, appropriately informative and sympathetic, and waxed mildly lyrical on the nature of Tekserve, which was that rare enterprise that jumped the moat between renowned and legendary; how idiosyncratic the owners and offices were, the list of writers and TV and movie stars who sat in the little lobby above 23rd St and waited for their number to be called on the repurposed Mac Plus on the wall knowing that their livelihoods might depend on a tech’s ability to raise a hard drive from the dead.
The article (and the others that I found that also relayed the news) also mention how Tekserve featured prominently in an episode of “Sex and the City”, and how Tim Cook visited there and liked what he saw, and then went on to talk about how with the advent of Apple’s own retail efforts stores like Tekserve withered and died, and thus we all go into that good night and so on and so forth. Lots of whimsy, lots of meditations on capitalism and the things we gain and lose and so on and so on and, well, so on.
Well-written stuff – put together by far better writers than I am with far better taste and technique, but I feel like they all rather missed the point; an outfit like Tekserve – driven so strongly by iconoclastic personalities like Dave Lerner and Dick Demenus – should always be the byline where the real stories are about the people who created the thing, and not the thing itself.
Reading that Dave Lerner had passed away? It put a momentary pause on time when I read it; a quiet, still little bubble of inexplicable sadness. Yes, Tekserve was great and whatnot, but Dave Lerner is literally the one man who is – at root – responsible for pretty much every single thing I have achieved in my professional life in IT.
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When I was twenty-four years old, I was living in an apartment in the Village with my girlfriend, who I’d marry before I hit twenty-five. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, an illegal alien. I’d overstayed my tourist visa and, okay, was actively pursuing the path towards a green card so that I could stay with said girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, but at that point in time, yeah, I was effectively un-hireable. Which was a shame, because I had an enormous amount of experience in the field of repairing Apple laptops; I had, after all, spent the prior two years working as one of six bench techs for the UK’s largest Apple reseller – right in the middle of a series of epic product recalls that had most of us taking apart and replacing logic boards in the PowerBook 5300 line for a solid eight hours a day.
That laptop had featured prominently in both Mission:Impossible and Independence Day – huge movies of the time – and Apple had sold a boat-load of the things that all had power adaptor ports that snapped off if you looked at them wrong or, I don’t know, breathed at them. A month into the recall most of us could disassemble, repair, and reassemble one in less than three minutes.
(Fun fact: I found one at a thrift store a year or two back and yeah, it turns out that nearly-thirty-year-old muscle memory actually kind of sticks around…)
So, when I went to find any kind of work in New York City in the late fall of 1997, I immediately found my way about fifteen blocks north of our apartment, walked up a couple of flights of stairs to Tekserve’s offices, and asked if they were hiring. Inside of about ten minutes, I found myself sitting across from a large, mildly angry-looking, suspender-wearing, florid man with his back to the window and a huge desk mostly covered in radio equipment in various states of assembly.
This was David Lerner. I wish I could say I had perfect recollection of the conversation, but c’mon, it’s been twenty-eight years. I recall I’d filled out an employment application and that he looked at it, liked the fact that I’d borne a respectable chunk of a major market’s hardware repair disaster on my shoulders, that I had a degree and was smart and a quick study. He also liked the fact that I’d brought the PowerBook 5300 that I’d made out of literal scrap parts, and that while we talked I took the thing apart and rebuilt it to prove that I knew what I was doing. However, he didn’t enjoy the fact that I wasn’t a legal resident or citizen, as that would make, y’know, paying me a tricky proposition.
We danced around… off-the-books remuneration. That wasn’t new to me; I’d already been doing cash-in-hand IT work for an outfit out of New Jersey that had a big Macintosh-based client near Times Square and had no real idea about AppleTalk networks and MacOS troubleshooting. Still, ultimately Dave sighed, not unsympathetically, and told me that if he was going to hire me then I’d need both legal residency and also the appropriate Apple repair certifications.
This was an awkward problem, it turned out. He’d need to hire me before Tekserve could go and tell Apple that I was an employee and then enroll me in the formal training to achieve the official certifications that any Apple-authorized repair outfit would require to allow me to work on customer machines. The certifications I had from working in the UK? They didn’t translate over to the equivalent certifications required for the US market. And, of course, he couldn’t hire me until I was legally able to work in the US.
I vaguely remember the two of us looking over the desk at each other, non-plussed, before he scowled, picked up my employment application, looked at it again, and then told me that he’d make me a deal; he’d tell Apple I was an employee, fudge the details, cover the cost of the training materials and exams that I would need – out of his own pocket – and then when I was legally able to, we could talk again about a job if I was still interested. I said an enthusiastic yes, and we shook on the deal.
Three months later, I’d passed every exam and had a handful of professional certifications that meant I was qualified to work on Apple computers and devices in the US.
Two months after that, I married my girlfriend.
Four more months after that, we moved to Seattle where the immigration processing time was about a third of what you had to deal with in New York.
A year after my meeting with Dave Lerner, I had a green card and a job doing bench repair with a big regional Apple reseller in the Pacific Northwest.
Another year or so after that, I got hired as in-house IT for a branding/design agency.
Five years after that, I branched out and started my own IT consulting company.
Twenty years later, I am fifty-two, self-employed and (by pretty much any measure) successful in a career that I thoroughly enjoy and find rewarding. And, while I’ll toot my own horn for a moment and admit that yeah, it took a lot of work to get here, pretty much every single step in my career path traces back to one man having a busy day in a hectic office deciding that he’d put out a hand and – without making a fuss about it – help a kid out in a very tangible, practical way. I can’t shake the mild guilt that I never held up my end of the deal and went to work for him – but, then again, by the time I was able to do that I was twenty-five hundred miles and three time zones away.
I am… profoundly grateful to David Lerner, and his passing at 72 seems far too early for a man of his outsize personality. On a selfish, personal note, it occurs to me that when I sat down with him on that late fall afternoon in 1997, he was eight years younger than I am now. Given the small portion of time we get to kick around this mortal coil, we should probably all be striving to be more decent, honorable, and pragmatically generous, and to follow the kind of example of people like David Lerner. Gone too soon, but leaving a lasting impression on an entire community who are all saddened by his loss.