Employee No. 8

Chris Espinosa, on the 34th anniversary of his official start day at Apple:

Steve Jobs had been paying people out of the company checkbook, and not all that regularly. So Scotty lined folks up to make an official payroll. He picked employee number 7 for himself because he wanted it, and allocated the other 10 or so people in a nominally fair order. (I’m going to skip the legendary story of whether Steve Jobs is number 0 or 2 because I wasn’t there and have no direct knowledge.)

The reason I got number 8 was that Scotty did this in the middle of a weekday, and I didn’t get out of high school until 2:40. By the time Randy Wigginton and I got there the first five numbers were taken, so we got 6 and 8 respectively.

★ Friday, 18 March 2011