Products That Deserve Exclamation Points

There's usually about a two hour gap between the time I leave work (5pm) and the time I get home from going to the gym (7pm). As an obsessive checker of Twitter, this is a scary time, as it always seems to be the case that big news comes to the surface precisely during this time when I'm unconnected from the system.

On Wednesday, October 5th, that gap was widened to about three hours. Danielle and I were trying a new recipe, and with the Yankees not on until Thursday, and after spending the past four days engrossed in baseball and football games for basically the entire night, I felt a responsibility to shower as quickly as possible, and help her get dinner ready.

After cooking and eating and cleaning up, I sat down with my MacBook Air at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. Danielle was finishing up the last of the dishes (My post-dinner cleaning responsibilities include clearing the table, putting stuff back in the refrigerator, getting anything that needs to be washed to the sink, clearing out the drain board, and cleaning all cooking/eating surfaces), her back to me. For some reason, the last full-screen app I'd used was Reeder, my RSS reader. Normally, I don't like to look at Reeder before Twitter--in my head, all the links people have tweeted are "spoiled." I glanced down anyway and saw the news, repeated maybe six or seven times in a row, every recent story the same:

Steve Jobs Has Died.

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I won't get into what followed, or the tributes, or the coverage. It's all been done to death, no pun intended. Much like the coverage of a new Apple product, the news of Steve's passing was met by an outpouring of grief, quickly followed by a negative response to the grief, and now has settled into what will most likely be the main narrative for some time, that he was an innovator, a genius, an irreplaceable piece of the American puzzle, who like the rest of us, had flaws of both character and personality.

I felt guilty at first, I'll be honest. I was stunned and upset. I'd deluded myself into thinking that his stepping-down as CEO of Apple wasn't necessarily confirmation of a worsening condition that had obviously been wearing him down over the last seven years. I'd treated his physical health the same as the lead-up to an Apple release, ignoring what was obvious and in plain-sight. I got over my guilt, accepted that I was truly saddened, and watched all the videos, read all the articles.

This was our Edison. For better or worse, Steve Jobs changed the way we approach life on a day-to-day basis. Not many people who've spent time on this planet can say that.

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I am one of the 1,000,000 people (literally) who pre-ordered the iPhone 4S. And even though I know the phone won't be available until this Friday, I've checked my "Order Acknowledgement" email, clicked the little link to redirect me to Apple's website, just to check my order status, about fifty times since Friday.

On that page (Your Orders. clearly stated at the top in the "This is the Apple headline Font and Style" font and style), everything is either white, black, grey or blue, and what little blue there is are all hyperlinks of some sort. Bold black on a grey background says, "Preparing for Shipment." With Apple, there are five different levels of order purgatory:

We've received your order
Processing Items
Preparing for Shipment
Shipped
Complete

But for the obsessive, what do these mean? Each level has an explanation, an explanation that you can see if you hover over a little icon, a blue circle with a Play Button-esque white triangle in it, next to the bold black "Preparing for Shipment." A rectangle appears, and your order's current status is highlighted in a slightly paler shade of blue (a different shade of blue because they want to highlight it for you, but not make you think the block of text itself is clickable). Anyone familiar with iOS will recognize the rectangle as what Apple calls a "popover."

Up until yesterday, my order status was "Processing Items," which, as the popover explains, means that:

We are preparing your item(s) to ship. While your order is being prepared, we are unable to modify your order details. Once your item ships, we will email you a Shipment Notification with complete order details.

Then, maybe around 2 o'clock, I was walking past my MacBook Air, I thought to check, and I saw I'd moved up to, "Preparing for Shipment," which I immediately let Danielle know about.

Okay--actually, I sang it.

--

This morning, the word on the Internet was that people were already receiving "Shipped" emails. Some even had tracking numbers. This led to a flurry of checks on my part. As of writing this, I'm still stuck at level PFS.

A few minutes ago, for no real reason, I looked at what came next on the popover. Shipped. The explanation?

Your order has shipped! Your carrier tracking number will be updated in online Order Status and the carrier’s website within 24 hours.

What struck me when I read this was the exclamation mark. As a writer, I hate them, as 99% of the time, they're used to give emphasis because none exists to begin with. Or to spice up a Facebook status, usually in blocks of five or ten. I like to imagine that Steve Jobs wasn't too fond of them either, for similar reasons. So what was one doing in this obviously carefully crafted webpage?

I thought about how I'd just read the explanation, how I'd heard it in my mind. I thought about how I'd read it when my order finally did ship, thought about how someone who isn't as tech-minded, or literary-minded would read it. I thought about my reaction just to finding out that my order, a phone, mind you, was preparing for shipment. I thought about what my reaction would be when the phone was finally delivered, and I opened it, and used it, and started thinking about the next one, and so on.

While the realistic, rational part of my brain wants me to go in a different direction, I'd like to imagine that Steve Jobs had something to do with the placement of that exclamation point. Because that's his legacy to me. He made sure, in his too-brief time, that he created a company that paid attention to the details, to the small things.

He took the lead in creating products that deserve exclamation points, because he knew that people like me would care enough to get up at three in the morning to pre-order them. He knew that we would check the status of our order far too many times, even when we already pretty much knew what the status was.

He knew that we would be that happy -- exclamation mark happy -- when we checked, and the phone, or the computer, or the whatever, finally read: Shipped.