On this day of the big annual Apple product launch, I’m remembering that day many years ago when Julie and I went to the Terminator experience at the Universal Studios theme park on vacation.

All these theme park experiences have the same storyline: The audience is supposedly dignitaries taking a VIP tour of some science-fiction location. And Something Goes Terribly Wrong, and the special effects start going off around you.

In the case of the Terminator experience, the audience–which included me and Julie that day–were supposedly journalists at a press conference for Cyberdyne Systems, unveiling its new Terminator model robot soldier.

And, of course, the Terminator runs amok and starts blowing things up and disrupts the press conference.

The funny thing is that I am a journalist, and Julie did tech PR for most of her career. And we have both been to a million product launch press conferences.

So there we were on vacation doing a science fiction simulation of the exact same things we did at work every day.