The Professional
I’ve always been the type to pretend I know exactly what I’m doing when I have no clue about it at all. Travel to a new city and I skip all the obvious tourist stuff. Rome, Toronto, wherever—I pass right by the monuments and crowded squares and go straight to whatever restaurant I’ve decided has the best som tam, completely sure and probably wrong. My friends ask for directions and that’s when they realize I don’t even know which way is north. Same thing with games. Load up something new and I click straight to inferno or hardcore or whatever the cruelest setting is. Quit in frustration twenty minutes later. But that’s what professionals do, right?
Except at actual work. When it comes to the one thing I actually get paid for—the closest I get to being a real professional—I do the complete opposite. I act like an amateur. You can see it in what I use to do the work.
I switched to Apple in the early 2000s and never quite sank into the whole thing. My friends in Berlin’s media world, the ones who turned hobbies into websites and somehow ended up at startups, they move through their apps like concert pianists. On MacBook Airs they navigate through menus I’ve never seen. When I mention I still use Mail they look at me like I’m damaged. You don’t know about Sparrow?
they ask. You’re supposed to be a professional.
So before we went public with this newsletter, I went through the App Store like it was a shrine. Read The Verge, Mashable, Wired, downloaded everything. I was going to become a real pro. Spotify for music because they gave me free months. Skype and Twitter for talking. Airmail because it looks better even if it doesn’t work quite right. Feedly and Fluid for feeds—I’m one of the early Feedly Pro people because RSS is basically what I do. Coda for web work. Pages, Keynote, Numbers. Things to remember what I’m supposed to do. Doo for invoices. Evernote for actual thoughts. Pocket for articles I tell myself I’ll read. Chrome. And the full Creative Cloud suite: Bridge for organizing, Photoshop for editing, InDesign for keeping our media kit current, Premiere Pro because I keep talking about making a live-action CatDog 3D feature and some test animals didn’t survive the casting process.
Now it’s just this chain. Email comes in, Airmail handles it. Invoice arrives, Things reminds me. A photo looks flat, Photoshop’s already open. This mechanical handoff where each app passes the work to the next one and nothing really requires me to think. And maybe that’s the whole thing. I’m surrounded by expensive tools and subscriptions, and they let me keep pretending I’m a professional. In restaurants I’ve never been to, in games set to brutal difficulty, in the actual work. Whether I actually know anything or I’m just hiding behind a wall of applications that do my thinking for me—well, that’s not something I spend time wondering about.