When I first got my 3G [coming from a Razr], I remember being confused how to mute it--that I couldn't find the setting for mute. When I found the button for silence, I was struck for a few minutes that no one had thought of this before.

Just preordered my 4S to replace it. I admit I was a bit disappointed--I prefer the rounded back so I'd hoped for a case redesign. Even at this much of an upgrade [I don't have video, haven't been able to upgrade iOS in six months], I don't expect the "magic phone" feeling I had with the 3G. Far fewer people had smartphones at that time (May 09). Always startled me when my phone would create a stir. Now I get more of "wait, how old is your phone anyway?"

After decades of mismanagement and neglect, service broke down completely in Chicago in 1966. "The sorting floors were bursting with more than 5 million letters, parcels, circulars, and magazines that could not be processed," Lawrence O'Brien, the Postmaster General at the time, would recall somewhat poetically. "Outbound mail sacks formed still gray mountain ranges as they waited to be shipped out."

And here I thought Terry Pratchett's Going Postal was fiction.

He was raised in Westchester County and went to Philips Exeter, then Harvard.

Many others have as well, and have not done what he did. But that still doesn't qualify as "starting from zero" or "nothing to show."