They Do Not Make Them Like This Anymore

Steve Jobs had BO. He never bathed. At his first job, with game-maker Atari, all his co-workers complained about the smell. Yet, the boss liked him. So he kept his job.

He decided to quit his job and go to India because a friend who’d just returned from there had raved about a guru. He spent seven months in India, traveling on the cheap, no fixed itinerary, searching for an elusive spiritual enlightenment.

During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only sporadically, getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he passed through, and so they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them to pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos. “My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my mother came up and said, “Steve?”

— Steve Jobs, Chapter Four: Atari and India