A UPS delivery woman appears. There’s a big box on her shoulder.
—Please sign here, she says.

I sign. I look at the address of origin. Not even the faintest flicker of recognition. Who or what?

I open the box. Inside the box is the largest and heaviest trophy I’ve ever received. It’s a sixteen inch, bronze and gold plated statue featuring an androgynous, futuristic, vaguely human being holding aloft—what is it, a Mac SE 30? At it’s base, the words: “2008 MacWorld Editor’s Choice Awards, AppleJack 1.5, The Apotek.” Come to think of it, the statue shares some characteristics with an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award (a.k.a. the Oscar): mute, muscular, angular, yet poised for eternal calm.

And then, a sudden giddiness rushes in. Wow! I got a trophy in the mail from MacWorld! How wonderful! (and strange).

I set the statue aside and keep working.

And then I start to feel guilty. AppleJack is certainly not perfect. There are more than a few bugs out there, and some users have reported critical problems after using it. Shouldn’t I be spending more time on it? Also, the yeoman’s share of the Leopard-compatibility effort was done by Steve Anthony, not by me. Maybe the statuette’s passive art-deco intimations of a sleeker, less frail society are meant to goad me into quickly responding to those long-delayed feature requests, the bug reports, the requests for help that, strangely, become more cryptic and hard to understand the more you know about computers. There’s something about that statuette’s perfect stasis, the placid way in which it holds up that square representation of a block of highly toxic, once cutting edge circuitry and display material to the sun. Like a long-ignored task list, it provides its own justification for keeping its arms aloft, to continue in that unproductive and early 21st century Western attitude of possibility rather than actuality. Either that, or it’s meant to express we the computer users’ eternal supplication: “god, please fix!”