In this digital age, technology can connect us in ways we never imagined. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share stories of the weird and wonderful ways technology created new opportunities and forged new relationships.

Part 1: In an attempt to be seen as “cool” by his friends, Azhar Bande-Ali reaches out to the Steve Wozniak and invites him for coffee.

Azhar Bande-Ali is a storyteller who likes his tales with a side of laughs. His award-winning debut solo show, "Curry and Catharsis," presented at the NYC Fringe Festival, won hearts for telling an Indian story hyphenated by an American upbringing. As a former Moth StorySLAM winner, he obsesses over story structure that leaves plenty of room for silliness to highlight the complexities of the human experience.

Part 2: Don Picard can’t stop using technology to keep tabs on his son.

Don Picard has worked in the Boston area for 30 years as a software developer. He was a double major in Theatre Arts and Computer Science at Cornell, and chose to work as an engineer in order to be able to live in Cambridge and feed his family. Don enjoys telling live stories about his kids, husband, and extended family as it is fun, therapeutic, and allows him to exercise the other half of his college degree so he doesn't become bitter.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I went to a university that was so nerdy that all of our campus students looked like they were auditioning for the Big Bang Theory. There was not a single cool person in sight.

A few years after I graduated, I saved up some money and flew to San Francisco for the first time to see my friends who had graduated with me and moved to San Francisco. One of my friends took me to a tour of his office and I walked away feeling so shocked. If our lives were TV shows, his was MTV and mine was black‑and‑white C‑SPAN. He was hanging out with celebrities, eating incredible food, flying all over the world, and I was worried about my lunch being stolen at the fridge in the office.

At the end of the tour, I just sat in my car in the parking lot and this heavy weight was sinking into my chest. I wasn't sure what I did wrong and why my life wasn't cool like my friends. That is when I did something impulsive. I pulled out my phone and I googled "Badass things to do in San Francisco," which is something that no badass person has ever done. It wasn't so funny back then.

Azhar Bande-Ali shares his story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in August, 2024. Photo by William House.

In that dark parking lot, my face glowed from the brightness of my screen on the iPhone. I found that I could go kite surfing in the Bay, but I had a high deductible health insurance. Someone said I could go for a night tour at Alcatraz, but I'm a software engineer not a Ghostbuster, and I don't look good in a jumpsuit.

Then on one of the forums, somebody was talking about all the celebrities that you could meet in San Francisco. Obviously, the most important celebrity in San Francisco is Nancy Pelosi, but I had a different idea. To me, the most exciting cool celebrity in San Francisco is obviously Steve Wozniak.

Steve Wozniak is like the John Goodman of technology. He's beloved. He's down‑to‑earth and severely underappreciated. Steve Wozniak, for those who don't know, is the co‑founder of Apple with Steve Jobs. He was the key technical mind behind the first Apple computers that they sold out of a garage. Without him, Apple would have just been a hippie selling Red Delicious out of a food truck.

Instead of becoming an asshole billionaire, Wozniak became a personable non‑billionaire who just wanted to get around in his segue everywhere he went.

My job as a software engineer was to build mobile apps, and if Wozniak hadn't done what he did, I would have nothing to do right now.

It turns out, Wozniak was also pretty promiscuous with his email address, because it's like the second search result on Google. And so I drafted an email that sounded like a middle ground between nonchalant and stalker.

And I said, "Hi, Steve. I'm a software engineer visiting from Atlanta. Very grateful for all the work you've done. I would love to buy you coffee. And if you're around, I'd love to take you out. If not, totally understand. Good luck, Azhar.”

As soon as I hit send, my car door opened. And I thought, “Oh, my God, Wozniak is here.” It was just my stupid friend that was ready to go to dinner.

And so I put my phone away. We went for a Mediterranean meal and met up with some of our other friends.

And I love my college friends. These are amazing people. We've done all‑nighters together. We've stolen each other's homeworks. And there's a lot of love between us. But at that dinner, every life update they shared made my heart go darker than a burnt falafel. So I just kept sinking deeper into my seat and, eventually, I just started scrolling Reddit to just not think about what they were saying.

And I got a Gmail notification. The sender's name was gibberish to me because the name was upside down and read from right to left. And there's only one person who was quirky enough to do something like that.

So I quickly checked the email, and I was like, “Oh, what did Steve write to me?”

It was an autoresponder, asking me to verify whether I was human.

What was I thinking, expecting Steve Wozniak to respond to my email? I was a little disappointed, but I did the captcha anyway, because you got to respect a good puzzle.

Then my friends, they paid for the dinner, which is the least they could do, and we walked out into the parking lot to say our goodbyes.

And as we were saying goodbyes, my phone vibrated again and I checked it. It was an email from the same gibberish name and it said, "Hi, Azhar. Can you meet me at an IHOP in Cupertino at 8.30 tomorrow morning? Best, Woz. Here's my number.”

Of course, the founder of Apple would send an email from his iPhone and only eat at IHOP. That's the best joke in the story.

I froze at that email as if I was an iPhone trying to send a photo text message to an Android device. My friends gathered around me, trying to read the email, and everybody was panicking.

Once all of that dramaticness settled down, I told them about the original email, about the captcha, and suddenly, a consensus was formed. Everybody said, if I went to this breakfast, I was either going to get robbed or murdered.

And they were right. What was I doing? I'm in a new city, I had to fly back home tomorrow, I cannot be driving from San Francisco to Cupertino. I don't know what I'm going to get into. So I agreed that it's better to be alive than to be cool and I decided not to go.

And as we were saying our goodbyes, one of my friends asked me when I was going to be back in San Francisco, and I thought to myself, “I don't have the money to keep doing this all the time,” so I said, “I don't know. Probably never.”

And he poked me in the ribs and said, “Oh, I guess that was your last chance to meet Steve Wozniak, so, you know, good luck next time.”

And we laughed and I got in my car and I drove back to my hotel. The whole time I thought, if I go back to Atlanta, will I have missed my only chance to be cool and will I be relegated to a life full of boredom forever?

Once I parked into the hotel parking lot, I wrote a response to the email and I said, “I'll see you tomorrow morning,” and I hit send.

The next morning, I woke up at 7:00 in the morning, checked out of my hotel, took my physical and emotional baggage and put it in my car and I drove down, started driving down to Cupertino.

My plan was very simple. I'm going to meet Wozniak at 8:30, I'm going to get back in my car and drive up to the airport and catch my flight at noon. I had no time in the schedule to get kidnapped or robbed.

And as you drive down from San Francisco to Cupertino, you pass all of these campuses, like Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Dropbox and all of these amazing companies that I depend on every day that would not have existed without Wozniak. And I couldn't believe I was going to meet him soon.

At 8:20, I got to the IHOP. This place was packed, so at least I wasn't going to get robbed. But there was no Wozniak visible in the place at all.

I texted the number and I said, "Hey, I'm here. I don't know where you are." And I started making laps of the IHOP to see him. And at 8:25, I checked my phone again and he said, "This is my live location. Where are you?” He was at an IHOP on the other side of the city.

A small part of me wondered if I was being Punk’d, which would have been nice because then I would meet Ashton Kutcher and that would have been cool. But I hauled my ass, grabbed everything, drove out to the other location.

At 8:40, I got to this IHOP, and this one is dead. Not a single car in the parking lot. I stayed in the car for a second to see what was going on. I tried to see if there were any security cameras, but the P in IHOP doesn't stand for protection.

And I thought, “Look, I've come this far. I might as well see what happens.”

I got out of the car, walked into the IHOP, nobody in there except in the middle of the room is Steve Wozniak sitting there with his wife. I wanted to run up and give him a hug, but I had to be professional so I gave him a handshake, which is still better than getting robbed.

We sat down, he asked me my name, he asked me how long I was here and I told him I was leaving in a few hours, and we talked about everything. We talked about Android, we talked about iPhones, we talked about Apple, we talked about what was going to happen with technology, and the whole time I was waiting to ask him one single question.

When the plates got cleared, I built up the courage to ask him, “What would you do if you were an engineer today who wanted to be cool?”

Azhar Bande-Ali and Steve Wozniak in front of an IHOP.

He took a deep breath and I expected him to say, “To get a job at a big company,” or I expected him to say, “To go work for a startup.” I expected him to say, “To go learn a new programming language.”

What he said was he would just tinker with what makes him happy and what gives him joy, because all the cool things that have happened to him have happened in hindsight. And “cool” is a perception problem not an identity problem.

It was hard to grasp how profound that message was because he still had pancake crumbs in his beard, but on the five‑hour flight home, it sank in. And when I landed, I posted a picture of us in front of the IHOP on Facebook, and all of my successful cool friends commented on how jealous they were of the photo.

But to me, the coolest thing about that photo was I did what I wanted to do. I didn't follow a list on the internet to become cool. I just met the person that I wanted to meet and say thank you to him.

A few years later, Snapchat was the cool new app on the internet. I downloaded it and the first message it gave me was, "Hey, do you want to follow this Steve Wozniak guy that's in your contact list?"

I wanted to be cool, but I don't want to know what he was tinkering with on Snapchat, and so I said, "No, I'm cool."

Part 2

Parenting is hard. When my daughter was first born, my sister‑in‑law called me and gave me the following advice. “The goal for the first year is to not kill the baby.” Which I think is good advice. I also think it should probably apply to the remaining years. But I didn't know what she was getting at.

Babies really only have a survival instinct, so, like, they won't walk off cliffs or something. But you have to feed them and bathe them and dress them, and they require constant supervision.

The hard thing for me as a parent is learning how to transition from that to a place where they can become an adult and make their own choices and live their own lives.

When my son was about 15 or 16 years old, we were vacationing on the island of Nantucket. He went out with his cousins and we gave him a curfew, and he blew past the curfew. It was getting almost an hour after curfew, and we're texting him and he's not answering.

Don Picard shares his story at MIT Museum in Boston, MA in August, 2024. Photo by Kate Flock.

My husband, Robert, and I decided that we needed to tap into the military satellites that are available through our cell phones and use GPS. I looked this up just to be sure. Which requires quantum mechanics in order to operate. We had to tap into that technology in order to track our son down to a beach.

And we thought that the right thing to do in this moment would be to actually get in the car and drive to the beach and confront him in person. I think part of it was that I had real concerns about his safety. I know that he's 15 or 16 years old, but with all of those hormones, teenagers don't have the survival instincts of a newborn. I could totally see him walking off a cliff. Not on Nantucket, but somewhere.

I didn't think back to when I was his age and my parents would put me on a train with my friends and we would go to the island of Manhattan. My agreement with them was that I would call collect from a payphone so that they would know I was safe. They would deny the charges, of course. They didn't want to talk to me. They just needed to know that I was okay. We used the technology of basically sending electrical impulses over copper wires, like Alexander Graham Bell used. I'm not that old. It's just the technology hadn’t changed since then.

Anyway, we confronted him and he said it was a violation of his privacy and he was really angry and he turned off the Find my Friends feature. It became known as the Nantucket Incident in my family.

A few years later, I got COVID. I got COVID really early, like so early that there wasn't the test yet and my doctor didn't believe me. I said I lost my sense of smell and he said, “That's not even a symptom.”

But I got sick but not hospital sick, but it did tell me that I needed to stop putting things off. And one of the things that we had been putting off for decades was getting a place away from the city. We didn't know how to make it happen, but I was darn sure we were going to because I was losing my mind.

So we managed to buy a house in the mountains of New Hampshire. We couldn't afford a lake house and I didn't need a lake house, but it was a perfect piece of haven for me, and very quiet and still. I love living in Cambridge and I love getting away.

My son is now 21 years old and he likes going up to the New Hampshire house. He was going up in the winter.

Now, the house is a four‑season house, but the mountain road is a private dirt road. It's three quarters of a mile to our property. And James has a Honda Accord.

I was like, “James, we don't know what the conditions of the road are. You might not be able to make it.”

And in a way that only a 21‑year‑old would, he said, "That's okay. If I can't make it up the road, I'll park at the bottom of the mountain and walk up."

“Okay.”

He also let me know that he was going to be going up after work, so he wouldn't be arriving to the house until 1:00 in the morning.

“Okay.”

And I had to work late that night, and it just so happened that I was trying to fix a bug. I didn't succeed, but I was tired of beating my head against the wall and I was just tired in general. I put it away and I looked at the clock and it was 1:00 in the morning.

And I thought, “I can check to see if James got to the house okay because we have security cameras. I can access them from my phone.” It can use satellite technology over the internet to make it so we can see what's going on to our remote house.

So I looked it up and looked down the driveway and his car was not in the driveway. I couldn't go to bed, but I should have, because as I'm watching down the driveway, I see this lone figure walking up the mountain road and turning into our driveway. It has to be my son, like who else would it be? But the camera resolution isn’t that great.

I could see that whoever it was wasn’t wearing a winter coat, so that made it seem more like it was my son. And I'm thinking, “Okay. It's James. He's going to be fine. I just have to watch him get into the house.” And he is taking a very long time to walk up out the driveway that isn't that big.

And he's about a third of the way up the driveway, and he stops. He wanders around in a circle. I'm like, “What the heck is he doing? Like, get in the house.”

Then his backpack slides off his shoulder and it falls to the ground. I'm like, “Well, that's weird.”

And then James just flat out falls to the ground, like boom.

I screamed. He's two hours away. I can't get to him. He can't stay in the snow for two hours. I don't know what happened but, clearly, he must have, like, hypothermia from walking up the mountain without a winter coat.

I got to call 911, and I do remember Tom who lives on the mountain year‑round. He said that if there's ever an emergency, don't call 911. You call me and I will get you to the hospital a lot faster than the ambulance will.

But it's 1:00 in the morning, and I don't really think I can call Tom.

And I'm thinking, “Just chill just chill.” But parents, we go to a really dark place really fast. We don't think, you know, “Oh, everything's gonna be great.” And he looks like he's having a seizure.

And I'm thinking, “If I'm calm, maybe he'll be okay.” As I'm thinking that, he begins to stand up. I'm like, “Okay, I just have to call him.”

He won't answer. He never will actually talk to me. We normally text. But I'm thinking, “Maybe if I call him, maybe he'll answer. Maybe I can then use my decades of software engineering experience to make a medical diagnosis as to whether or not he's still lucid.”

I call him and I can see him raise the phone to his ear and he answers and he says, "’Sup?"

I'm like, "’Sup? Are you okay?"

And he says, "Are you stalking me?"

And I'm having flashbacks to the Nantucket Incident, and I'm so like, "No. No, I'm not stalking you. I just happen to be looking up the security cameras around the time that you're coming up there. I just need to know that you're okay."

He said, "Dad, I'm fine. Go to bed."

I was like, "Okay." And he hung up on me.

I didn't go to bed. I had to watch him get to the house. It still took a long time, but he did. He got into the house, and as soon as the door was behind him, I turned off the app and I went to bed.

I didn't know what it was that was going on. All I knew was that it had to be a conversation that we would have in person. And we did, two days later when he was home.

I was like, "James, I'm sorry. I was just really worried about you. Like, what was happening that night?"

And he said, "Dad, I was making snow angels.”

I had this real shift in my image of what this was like for him. He had just walked up three quarters of a mile of a dirt road in the mountains, not passing not even a single soul, never mind wildlife. And not a car, nothing.

And he turns onto the driveway and there's new fallen snow and he's on a five‑acre private lot, completely alone and isolated and calm and peaceful, and he decides that he's going to engage in what is probably, for the last time in his life, some childhood exuberance and make snow angels.

He does and he is full of joy and he stands up and the phone rings and someone says, "Are you okay?" And in one moment, I robbed him of all of it. I robbed him of that experience, of that joy. Honestly, I don't know why he didn't just throw the phone into the woods.

So, I guess all I'm trying to say is even when you have the technology, you may not want to use it. And I think what I've learned is, the next time, because I know there will be a next time, I don't know when, but I know there'll be a time when I have the same opportunity. I'm probably going to look at the cameras anyway, because I'm not going to be a different person, but maybe the lesson all I've learned is to just stay calm and not blow my cover.

Thank you.