I Call it the iStore or lol Cats (to Follow the Naming Conventions of Apple)

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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.

  • SteveJ

    Great story!

    This reminds me of the last time I went to best buy. The wireless router antenna crapped out, wife can’t use the internet, must fix today, I’ve got a gift card. I was feeling pretty rough, and looking probably rougher, but I threw on a hat and went to Best Buy. I head straight for the routers, grab what I think is a newer version of the router I have and scan the box. A blue shirted wonder sidles up to me…

    Best buy employee: You don’t want to buy that one
    Me: *blink*
    Best buy employee: You see this other model is an n-router so that means it goes faster.
    Me: *blink*
    Best buy employee: …continues dumbed-down spiel…
    Me: How many cisco certifications do you have?
    Best buy employee: *confused*

    I had to just walk away. Obviously he couldn’t tell by looking at me that I didn’t need his help, but to start the conversation by dissing the product I was likely to buy? And particularly at that brand of store I find that if you actually want help (say you want something behind the case) you can’t find anyone, they’re all clustered around a computer clear across the store goofing off. If you don’t want help they are all over you.

    I can’t wait until we get the transporter worked out so I can get instant gratification from internet purchases.

  • VicAndSpike

    The iStore is evil. All evil is coming from one place. They call it the Genius Bar, but there is only minimum wage workers in sight. You might think “Ohh, a bar. I’ll have a Budweiser,” but there is no alcoholic drinks in sight. If I stayed in there ten more seconds, I would have laughed my ass off. If you think the iStore is a good place to be, THINK AGAIN!!!!!!!

  • @SteveJ

    “I can’t wait until we get the transporter worked out so I can get instant gratification from internet purchases.”

    Oh, yes. The iTrans. I almost forgot about that. :) When that comes out (and yes, gets discovered as a viable technology, blah, blah) it’ll totally change the way we do stuff. Lazy now. No, super lazy is still to come. :)

    What’s funniest is the the n-routers aren’t going to do anything for you if you don’t have the computer hardware to back it up… Best Buy employee just neglects to mention that tid bit of information.

    I agree that if you had needed help, you wouldn’t have been able to find a single soul. Happens to me all the time.

    I think Radio Shack is the worst when it comes to bad help and advice. I hate going there and only do if I just need something simple like a cord and it’s all I’m near. Being a woman, sales people automatically assume I’m technology retarded and an easy mark anyways.

    I always try to figure out (at least roughly) what I want before I shop for tech so that I can’t be lead astray by silly sales people.

  • Victor

    true true

  • @Vic

    Though I like hyperbole and appreciate your humor, you should be careful with your evilness comments. We don’t want to upset the Mac fan base- they are an easily irritated and zealous bunch. They might not appreciate your exaggeration, sarcasm, and attempt at humor.

    It wasn’t a bad place to visit. It was actually pretty entertaining.

    It might have been bad if we actually wanted something troubleshot and fixed, but I guess then they’d just ship it off to be taken care of. We got a new iPod. We saw a lot of brightly colored shirts. Not a bad visit, all in all.

  • I found a bit of background on our Genius Bar and how it all used to be different. It explains a few things.

    Genius Bar: The Apple Store’s Fading Legacy?

    Also, as an answer to Vic’s minimum wage comment (and asking me about that while in the store) I did some online snooping. It looks like they make better than minimum wage, but not a lot. With a name like ‘genius bar’ you would figure well trained $18-$20/hr IT staff. Instead it looks more like a marketing thing with employees making more in the $12-$14/hr range at the most and being more sales/customer service people than tech people. Apple is great at marketing. They’re called geniuses, so they must be.

  • More genius at the genius bar. This is pretty funny.


    The Genius Bar Needs a Liquor License

    The comments below the post are what’s scary. It makes me think I’m going to be flamed by Mac fans any minute now. They try to blame the customer (who said she thought she set something wrong) when the genius missed the obvious. She gets called a cow, spoiled, and all sorts of stuff. Oh, man.

  • SteveJ

    Radio shack was my FAVORITE place in the world growing up. My dad’s was an electrician so we’d go and buy all sorts of cool stuff. They used to have walls of resistors, bread boards, etc. Now it’s a glorified cell phone kiosk. I actually really like the dudes at my local radio shack, but they’re pretty helpless. For some reason I expect too much…I wouldn’t dare ask a best buy employee for a null modem db9 gender changer, but I’ll try at radio shack. And wow! is it overpriced.

  • Radio shack is really overpriced, it’s true. If you know the guys then that’s different story. That makes most things better when you know someone that works there.

  • I love my iPod and use it all day everyday near-about. However, I live in fear and dread knowing there’s little I can do when it goes tits-up on me other than buy a replacement. Which is exactly how it felt when I had a Mac too. For the iPod’s ease and usefulness, I’m willing to accept the trade, no so with the Mac.

  • @Michael

    Welcome to the blog! :)

    To be fair, I hear great things about Apple Care- if you have the extra money laying around to pay for it, can afford the down time of sending your machine out, and don’t want to work on your own machine.

    Just seeing how much easier it is to open up and swap things in and out, get parts for PCs, it is a caveat of the Mac.

    I actually am one of the few people on the planet who don’t own an iPod. I have a Sansa which cost me a small fraction of the price, uses micro SD chips for memory (easily swapped out, cheap, and compatible with most everything), and I can chose not to use some bulky program out of the box. I just drag my music over using the operating system of whatever computer I’m on. I could use Rhapsody and have, and it’s quality is up there with iTunes.

    Once that warranty is up and your iPod dies, you are SOL. If you can get to the story before then, it sounds like they will usually give you a new one.

    One other gripe- when Vic and I got the replacement iPod, the warranty didn’t reset- it’s still from when the original one was purchased. Hopefully this one isn’t defective too.

  • My, the apple stores have changed since I was a kid (that’s the last time I went into one). As I recall, the last time I was there was shortly after my parents purchased the Apple II GS. We needed the new OS, so the guy at the store gave us a copy.

    GAVE… US… A… COPY… OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM!
    ON A 3.5 FLOPPY!

    This was, of course, because there was no hard drive on the II GS (no, seriously), so you had to stick the system disk in to boot from first.

    The world has certainly changed.