I had never been to an Apple Store before.

I had to pinch myself…

…to prevent myself from laughing so hard.

The little brother had a defunct 80 gig iPod Classic. We were greeted by a brightly t-shirted fellow whose sole job seemed to be a greeter. We were led to another brightly t-shirted fellow who plugged in the iPod and announced it worked fine. I told him to try unplugging it.


It shut off immediately.

“Oh.”

Pause.

“Well, let’s get you an appointment at the Genius Bar.”

Genius, as in super smart IQ, and bar, as in drinking alcohol? I thought I misheard. I followed him to a brightly t-shirted woman.

“Hi guys. Let’s get you set up with an appointment at the Genius bar!”

Pinch. I hadn’t misheard.

“Sure.”

“Can I have a name and email address?” I motioned to the little brother who had remained silent this whole time as I had instructed him to. I could tell he was pinching himself as well. He was trying really hard not to be a smart ass.

“victorcarmine@live.com”

“…”

The Apple woman looked perplexed.

“Did you say yahoo.com?”

“No. Live.com. It’s for my Xbox live account.”

“…”

“Are we going to a circle of Apple hell for having a Microsoft affiliated email address?” I asked forgetting to keep my smart ass in check.

“No,” she laughed, a bit nervously I thought. I checked my peripheral vision for Matrix-style agents or Steve Job’s face.

We were given an appointment for about a half hour later. We passed children sitting on large black balls playing on computers and exited to Gamestop.

A half hour later we took a seat at the bar (the regular one, not the genius one) to wait for our turn. Large screens gave us such fun facts as “Did you know that a Mac computer has the power of two computers combined?”.

My brother couldn’t help himself, “Yeah, two crappier computers.”

My brother may be eleven, but he is pretty smart. I saw his logic, “Technically, yeah, any computer could have the power of two computers with half of the hardware behind them. So technically, what they’re saying isn’t wrong…”

“Is stupid.”

“Correct,” I turned my attention away from the failed propaganda to the computer at the ‘bar’. Surprisingly, we could browse the web. After refraining from doing anything evil, we were called over to the more pretentious of the two bars. Yet another brightly colored t-shirted guy greeted us. This was starting to sound like a joke…

“A guy and a girl walk into a bar with and iPod.”

…with…

Q: “How many apple store geniuses does it take to troubleshoot and fix an iPod?”
A: “None. After plugging it in, holding down a few buttons, and trying to tell you it works fine, they just give you a new one.”

…which works for me. Two more brightly shirted people later we had a new iPod, a new case for it, and exited the Apple Store.

To those who missed the joke, lol cats is referring to the Mac operating system naming convention (ie: Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard). Can has werkin iPod, plz? Ktnxbye.

To those who see this as an opportunity to turn the comments into a Macs are better than PCs discussion, I am not interested in your fandom. I work with MacOSX, Windows, and various Linux distributions every day, and I do not have fandom attached to any OS or computer brand.
If you are personally offended by my poking fun, then you need to get a sense of humor. Ktnxbye.