Robert X Cringely, in his wonderful book Accidental Empires, tells a rib-tickling yarn about the early days pf Apple. It happened in the late 1970s when Apple had grown beyond the point that all the employees knew each other on sight. So it was decided that, like grown-up companies, they should all have name badges.
As is the corporate way, it was deemed that these badges should be numbered and, as corporate lore decrees, the number assigned would be based on the order in which employees had joined the company.
"Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1," writes Cringely, " Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on. Jobs didn't want to be number 2. He didn't want to be second in anything. Jobs argued that he, rather than Woz, should have the sacred number one since they were co-founders of the company and J came before W in the alphabet."
"When that plan was rejected", recounts Cringely, "he argued that the number 0 was still unassigned , and since 0 came before 1, Jobs would be happy to take that number. He got it."
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