As it happens, representatives from the Pittsburgh Technical Institute ended up coming to school to speak to prospective students a few weeks later. At PTI, you could study anything from graphic design to web development, from architectural drafting to criminal justice. The campus, not surprisingly, had tons and tons of computers. Then there was the clincher: at PTI, you could enroll in back-to-back semesters—no traditional winter or summer break—for two years straight, and then you’d be done.
“A degree in two years?” I said, wide-eyed with enthusiasm. “Um, yeah. I’m doing that.”
That afternoon I went home and announced proudly that I would enroll at PTI, where I was planning on majoring in video production and multimedia technologies. No longer was I destined to be a chef at Bob Evans. (Not that they would’ve hired me, anyway. Seriously, cannot cook.)
My parents were, obviously, relieved.
SORT OF MAKING IT IN THE REAL WORLD
PITTSBURGH TECHNICAL INSTITUTE LIES JUST outside Robinson Township, about twelve miles west of downtown, only forty minutes or so by car from where I grew up. Still, it was a major transition. I’d gone from a town in the middle of nowhere, a place where the streets often didn’t get plowed for days after a heavy snowstorm (bonus: lots of time off from school), to an apartment from which it was possible to drive to a suburban shopping mall in minutes. I’d gone from living at home with my parents and two younger sisters to living all on my own (albeit with a couple of roommates). I’d brought my G4 with me, and—for the first time in my life—I was surrounded by Macs and Mac users.
There were PCs at PTI, too, of course, but with so many graphic-design and multimedia classes available, they were seriously outnumbered by Apples. For a Mac lover like me, this was great.
Classes, for the most part, were good: I was in a program that stretched from around 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., ostensibly leaving one ample time to work on various design or programming projects. My living situation, however, was a little awkward. Instead of traditional on-campus residence halls or dorms, PTI coordinates with several off-campus, non-university-affiliated apartment complexes in order to house the bulk of its students. I was paired with three other girls, and we shared a two-bedroom apartment. My suite mates were nice enough, but four girls in one very small two-bedroom apartment made it pretty difficult to actually get work done.
I hung out there as little as possible, choosing to spend the bulk of my time in one of two ways:
First, I found employment with the Admissions Office, where it became my job to lead campus tours. For some reason, PTI was one of the first schools in the area (maybe even the state?) to own a Segway. I was required to ride one—inexplicably, the admissions staff thought this would be a real draw for prospective students—and to wear a protective helmet. I looked like a crazy person. More than one person asked me, with mock empathy, if something was wrong with me. “Is that why you have to ride this thing?”
“Um, no,” I’d say, shaking my head ever so slightly. “This is just my job. But thanks.”
Second—and I know this will come as a total shock—I spent a lot of my time online. By college, I had built a bit of a name for myself on a bunch of Apple forums. I was still using the relatively anonymous username xthree, but instead of making up funny backstories and pretending to be someone else, like I had done as a kid, I was using the Internet to seek out people who liked the same things that I liked, and I was spending more and more time chatting with a growing circle of online friends. At the same time, I was all over spymac.com, searching not just for friends but also for news and updates about upcoming Apple products. In the fall of 2001, for example, photos and a description of the forthcoming “iWalk” went up on the site. The photos were later proven to be kind of a hoax, but it’s generally thought that the rumors about the “iWalk” were based on the about-to-debut first-generation iPod. I mean, this was exciting stuff.
Speaking of the original iPod, I now had one, courtesy of my high school boyfriend. He had purchased it for my birthday from this website called eBay, which I actually had never heard of at the time. (By the way, do you remember the size of that FireWire port at the bottom of the first-generation iPod? It was like a brick.)
Anyway, as I began making more and more friends online, and sharing my love of Apple products with those friends, I slowly started to realize that I didn’t want to be anonymous anymore. I wanted people to know, hey, this is stuff that I’m into. I didn’t want to be xthree, x31337, x3, or anyone else but myself. Since I couldn’t be “Justine”—that username had already been taken on virtually every major site—I became iJustine, in honor of the iPod and the iMac. I registered the domain sometime in 2002. It was as simple as that.
• • •
As freshman year bled into sophomore year, some interesting things started to happen in the tech world. For one thing, Apple Computer, Inc., was changing.
It’s kind of ironic that I became such a die-hard Apple fan when I did—the nineties were a pretty troubling and traumatic time for the company. Following the now-famous ouster of Steve Jobs in 1985, the Macintosh operating system was allowed to grow more and more outdated; meanwhile, attempts to develop new platforms went nowhere, and Microsoft’s already dominant share of the market just kept growing. By the time he eventually returned as interim CEO (in 1997), Jobs had to shake things up. Which he did, by making what would become one of the most important and impactful decisions of his career: He announced that Apple Computer, Inc., would no longer just be a computer company. The Mac would become a “digital hub”; Apple would begin designing an array of new and innovative gadgets to sync with it. The introduction (and success!) of the iPod—the first of those gadgets—marked a turning point for the company.
At the same time, with the rise of social media and the launch of Myspace, the Internet landscape was undergoing a major shift. Following in the footsteps of DeviantArt and Friendster, Myspace became one of the first sites to be driven almost entirely by user-created content. It’s hard to imagine a world without social media now, but this was something none of us had really seen before: here was a ready-made platform to publicize your thoughts, your artwork or music, your interests, your very self. Myspace offered the music industry something it hadn’t seen before, either: an easy way to quantify a fan base by tracking one’s number of “friends.” Once the music industry—first aspiring musicians, followed quickly by more established musicians and bands—signed on, everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, too. Just a month after its “official” launch, Myspace had 1 million users.
I didn’t realize it then, but those two developments—the introduction of the iPod and the rise of social media—were about to have a major impact on my life, and it started when I stumbled across a website that allowed me to earn free Apple products through the magic of affiliate marketing. If I could get, say, ten people to sign up (read: enter their credit card number), the site would send me a free iPod. Since I loved iPods and I loved Apple, this seemed like a total no-brainer. I immediately started plastering photos of myself—posing awkwardly with an armload of iPods—all over Myspace. It didn’t take long to become known informally as “the iPod girl.” Without even putting that much effort into it, I ended up with something like six iPods and a free computer.
Now, please excuse me for a moment while I confirm that all those embarrassing photos have been properly removed from the web.
Oh God. They’re still there.
Note to the ladies: seek professional assistance before attempting to shape your eyebrows for the first time. Ugh. I’ll never get those years back. #itgetsbetter
Trying to score free iPods isn’t the only reason I joined so many social media platforms, but it’s part of the reason I started to build a rather large following. I joined sites like Myspace and Campus Hook, which was geared toward college students (this was more or less pre-Facebook). In fact, if you knew me at all between 2002 and 2004, I probably pressured you to join something. I was still running Dail
y Random Photo, and I’d started blogging a little about tech and gadgets. And though I wouldn’t have called it this at the time, I was also doing a fair amount of cross promotion (encouraging Myspace friends to follow me on Campus Hook, for example, and vice versa). The larger my following grew, the more I started meeting other Internet personalities with large followings, too.
Steve Hofstetter was one of those people (not to mention one of my first online friends to cross over and become my friend IRL). You might know him—these days he’s a successful comedian, as well as the host and executive producer of Laughs on Fox. Back then, though, he was an up-and-coming comedian, a funny blogger, and a writer for CollegeHumor. He had a sizable following, and I really liked reading his stuff, so when I came across his profile I decided to reach out and friend him. Because, why not?
Steve and I hit it off immediately, chatting about comedy and the Internet and comparing social media strategies. And then, somewhere along the way, I decided it would be a good idea to make a Myspace page pretending to be Ashton Kutcher.
Wait, let’s back up a minute. Here’s what really happened: I had a secondary Myspace page back then, which I used solely for testing purposes—whenever I decided to redesign my profile page, I’d experiment with the secondary page so I could see how the design looked before setting my own profile to public view. The Butterfly Effect had just come out, and I decided to use the movie poster as the default profile photo. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that people would even find it, let alone believe—for some inexplicable reason—that my dummy profile was the real Ashton Kutcher’s.
I had been sharing some of the random messages I had received from Ashton’s fans with Steve, but one day I thought it would be funny to actually friend Steve, posing as Ashton. I posted message after message on Steve’s Myspace page, apologizing for missing his most recent show and asking when he would be back in California. Suddenly, hundreds of teenage girls started friending Steve on Myspace, too. Not long ago, Steve told me that his rise on social media began, at least in part, because I was (and am) a huge goofball.
It bears mentioning that impersonating someone online is a horrible, horrible idea, and it really wasn’t my intention to do so (at least not originally). It’s also extremely embarrassing to admit that I did this, especially in light of the fact that I would actually meet Ashton Kutcher many years later. But my intentions were innocent. Building a following wasn’t about making money or seeking validation or boosting my ego; it wasn’t some half-baked attempt to get “famous”—it was mostly about staving off boredom. (Granted, I liked the free iPods, too.) As I watched my friend count grow, though, I started to realize that there was really something to this Internet thing. I could see that there were opportunities online, even though I didn’t have a clear sense for what those opportunities were, exactly.
And then, sometime in the beginning of my sophomore year, I met Desirée Cramer.
Dez was a freshman studying graphic design—we met through a mutual acquaintance and became friends almost instantly. Dez was funny and crazy and weird in all the same ways I was. We could chat about everything or nothing for hours on end. We both loved photography. We loved the same music. Sometimes we’d pick up and drive across the border to Ohio just to watch one of our favorite indie bands play.
By sophomore year, I had moved from my off-campus apartment into a large on-campus house. When I graduated, Dez took over my room, and I moved right to her couch. Technically, I was supposed to be back living at home with my parents for a while, but it was way more fun to stick around campus, hanging with Dez, crashing in her room or a friend’s room or even on the floor most nights. I didn’t yet know just how important my friendship with Dez would turn out to be.
By the time I graduated, Dez and I had already become regulars on the Pittsburgh indie music scene. We attended tons of local concerts, as often as four or five nights a week. We saw The Clarks and The Switch and School of Athens and The SpacePimps at our favorite hometown venues. I took moody photos of sweat-covered musicians and posted them to my Myspace and DeviantArt pages. Some of those bands even “hired” me to be their “official” photographer for the night. Of course, they didn’t have the money to actually pay me, so they traded for my services with concert tickets and CDs. To make ends meet—because I’d never be able to afford a place of my own on a nonexistent salary—I went looking for a job at American Eagle.
Some of my “professional photography”: Guitarist Josh Sturm of Kairos.
Neal Rosenblat and Johnny Naples from the Pittsburgh-based rock band School of Athens.
Since I was already a pro at getting people to sign up for iPods, I guess I figured that getting people to sign up for American Eagle credit cards would be no problem. The reality of working in retail, however, was considerably more complicated. Other than a brief stint giving campus tours, I’d never even had a job that required me to leave the house, let alone feel comfortable speaking with total strangers. I quickly realized that having to greet customers and talk up our in-store promotions was way outside my comfort zone. In fact, just walking into the store to get the job, past racks and racks of trendy, colorful clothing (none of which I owned at the time), I was so nervous I was practically shaking.
But it’s funny how things work out. Within a few weeks, I realized I actually liked talking to people. I loved hearing all about the events people were shopping for, as well as helping customers find pieces that made them look and feel amazing. I realized I loved the company, too—from the carefree style of the clothes to the fact that it’s headquartered in Pittsburgh. Sometimes, while folding jeans late into the evening, hours after the store had closed, I’d find myself looking up at the models on the walls, wishing that could one day be me. (I still haven’t graced the walls at AE, but I have had the chance to work with the company on some really fun digital projects in the years since.)
As it turns out, working at American Eagle didn’t just help me hone my social skills; it was also the only reason I was able to join Facebook as early as I did. At the time, you still needed an approved college email address (with the .edu domain) to register for an account; for some reason, PTI didn’t yet qualify. Lucky for me, our store manager had just entered graduate school—since she had two accounts, she offered to hand over the one affiliated with her undergraduate email address to me.
For the first several years of Facebook’s existence, I would send out friend requests with this message attached: Hey, this is Justine. Not Ashley Williams. I’m just using this account. Only recently was I able to remove her name completely (to this day we still joke about that time I was forced to be Ashley Williams). How strange, though, to think that someone I met at a shopping mall, with whom I worked for only a couple of months, would still be in my life today, for no real reason other than the fact that she once lent me her email address? Well, that and the fact that she also happens to be a really cool, generous girl.
• • •
I needed to find myself a steady, full-time job, so I applied at a local Pittsburgh printing shop called Business Partners, where they needed someone to lay out and design flyers and booklets and brochures. Not more than a day or two after dropping off my résumé, I got a message on Myspace: “I think you just had an interview at my parents’ place? I guess you’re going to be working there now?”
It was from Brandon, someone I’d originally met online but whom I’d recently become friends with IRL. He attended a fair amount of concerts with Dez and me. He was also, unbeknownst to me, the son of the husband-and-wife team I’d just interviewed with. Crazy.
So, I got the job. Within a matter of months, Dez had her graphic design degree, and Business Partners was hiring again. Which is how Dez and I found ourselves sitting across from each other in the first of a series of offices we would work in together. We ate lunch at Panera every day. We were so broke that we’d empty our pockets and pool our change to afford an afternoon trip to Starbucks. We shared a little two-bedroom a
partment in a redbrick building in a quiet suburb of Pittsburgh, populated mostly by elderly Polish people. (I only know this because Dez and I would sometimes sit outside and watch our neighbors file into the local Polish club for evening bingo.)
Life, for the most part, was good. I had a job—one that didn’t pay much, it’s true, but if I was able to cobble together enough quarters to spring for a five-dollar latte, I knew I was doing pretty okay. I had an apartment, which I lived in with my very best friend. I had a growing circle of online friends, too, as well as a respectable Internet following as iJustine. I was still taking pictures of Pittsburgh’s local rock stars at night, still trolling for iPods and reading about Apple products and signing up for new social media platforms and websites in my free time.
And then one day, about a year or so after taking the job at Business Partners, a rather strange thing happened.
I was sitting in the copy shop when a customer I’d never seen before breezed through the door. He looked nothing like our usual clientele. He had a paper-thin mustache. He was kind of a flashy dresser. He was wearing a blingy gold watch that probably cost more than I made in a year.
I strolled up to the front of the store and collected the papers he wanted to have copied—flyers advertising a local doctor’s office. His office, it turns out. It was easy to discern this, since his face was plastered all over them. Not once or twice, mind you, but multiple times. I quickly upsold him on both color printing and a heavier paper stock—“They’ll look so much better,” I said. As we were waiting for his copies to finish printing, I asked if there was anything else I could help him with. His beady eyes narrowed and focused on me.
I, Justine: An Analog Memoir Page 4