"You have to try to understand his job," our friend Kevin whispers while wrapping his arm around me.
It's Saturday before my 10th wedding anniversary, and my husband Phil, an Apple product design engineer, just mentioned he's heading for China in the morning. It's not fully unexpected given the time elapsed since his last trip. But I can't hide my disappointment. I had plans for our 10th. There's a guy with a f430 who was going to leave it parked in front of our house with a ribbon on it (as a joke). And then there are the tix to see a biker bar magician in conversation with Adam Savage from MythBusters.
The month of May may be a nice time to have had a wedding, but it is also high time for designs to transition to Asian manufacturers if you want to be in stores for Christmas. I have probably spent my anniversary alone for 8 of these 10 years.
The product design lifestyle is not one to be taken lightly. I am lucky to work in the industry, giving me insight into the reasons why someone would need to be in South China. I am not sure how Apple spouses from other industries cope. If you are going to be the one to engineer the HiFi, it has to help to have a spouse who will ultimately appreciate how hard it was to tool a perfectly flat, no draft, plastic surface and how hard it was to get each thread perfectly aligned running the perimeter of a speaker cover -- a speaker cover with no warpage or bowing. It helps to have a wife that can understand so that she'll bring up your daughter while you bring up a line at Foxconn.
Now granted, other spouses might raise the kids on their own. But how many of them would raise the kids and tell you how much they love Richard Howarth's ID?
We made it through Kerbango, Treo, the HiFi, and iPhones. I didn't ask questions when I gave him a GoPro camera for Valentine's Day one year, assuming he'd use it karting, only to have him open it up and immediately tear it down. Months later, I found out that he had been working on the Nano with video at the time. The teardown made sense in retrospect.
Through the life of these projects and my own work, Phil probably knows just how much I understand his job. But since I still need to give him an anniversary gift anyway and now that the Ferrari is out, I'll do something that I can "send" to China. I will write what I believe about his job. It's for him to decide if I understand.
This is my gift to Phil on our 10th anniversary:
