Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius Read online

  “I’m not sure,” I replied, as Apple didn’t make such specs public at the time. “It’s the same as the iPhone 3G has, I think.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I thought of everybody back here, you would know.”

  “Sorry,” I replied, turning back to my customer. “Oh, and Elizabeth,” I called after her. “It’s an ‘iPod touch.’ Not ‘iTouch.’ Get it right, please.”

  She spun on her heels, furious.

  I wasn’t worried. She was twice my age and half my size. I knew I could take her if it came to a fistfight.

  I was kind of hoping it came to that, actually. My comment was intentionally condescending, but I was just doing to her what she did to the rest of the staff on a regular basis.

  “Please don’t correct me in front of a customer, Stephen,” she scolded.

  I stepped out from behind the Bar, doing a quick sweep of the sales floor for a manager, who probably would have been upset with me if I’d punched an old woman in the face.

  “I’d prefer if you didn’t interrupt an interaction I’m having with a customer, especially with a question that you should know the answer to, Elizabeth.”

  As she stormed off, my customer leaned over to me.

  “Dude, she seems like a real bitch.”

  The iPhone That Wouldn’t Die

  The Apple Store I worked in was one of the first ones built, so our Genius Room was rather large by today’s standards. As such, we kept bad service parts in the room until they were inventoried the next morning. This meant we had high stacks of boxes, filled with dead logic boards, failed hard drives, and dozens upon dozens of swapped iPods and iPhones hanging out in the room all the time.

  Since I was the Lead Genius, I had my own desk in the corner, near the shelves of parts. One day, I was working on the schedule for the upcoming week, when every 45 seconds or so I’d hear a BUZZZZZ coming from the shelf.

  After a few rounds of this, I started to lose my patience. I found the offending box, which contained an original iPhone.

  “Why was this swapped?” I asked another Genius.

  “Guess,” she deadpanned, going back to her paperwork.

  I pulled up the notes on the issue that led to the phone being swapped. This iPhone would vibrate, on its own, every 45 seconds, just as it was currently doing in the Genius Room. Incredibly, the iPhone would do this even when it was supposed to be off.

  “Seems like this little guy shouldn’t have made it out of China,” I thought, as I buried the box in the bottom of the stack, hoping to muffle the sound coming from the box.

  As I sat back down in front of my spreadsheet, I heard it again, taunting me.

  I felt like I was unwittingly starring in “The Telltale iPhone.”

  BUZZZZZ. BUZZZZZ. BUZZZZZ.

  I slammed my MacBook Pro shut, and grabbed the box from the shelf again, scattering plain white iPhone boxes everywhere.

  “I can’t take this,” I muttered.

  “What?” asked my co-worker. She turned around to see me taking out the phone out of its box. “Don’t do anything stupid to that,” she warned. “It wasn’t marked as having accidental damage, so if you break it…” she tapered off, knowing that if the device and its repair paperwork didn’t match up, we would take a hit on our inventory accuracy metrics.

  At that point, I didn’t care about inventory, paperwork, rules or even the safety of anyone in the room.

  I sat the iPhone face up on the concrete floor and grabbed a crowbar we kept in the Genius Room — to this day, I don’t know why we had it, or where it came from — wound up, and I hit the iPhone as hard as I could.

  That turned out to be pretty dumb. Typically, if you hit something hard with something hard, you’ll not only break what you’re hitting, but probably your wrists as well. I didn’t hurt myself too badly, but the jolt through my arms made me drop the crowbar.

  The three or four staff members in the room stared at me.

  I hit it again, and as soon as I did, it happened.

  BUZZZZZ.

  BUZZZZZ.

  BUZZZZZ.

  I lost it. All common sense flew out the window.

  The iPhone, shattered and mangled, kept vibrating. Taunting me. Begging me for more.

  In that moment, that iPhone embodied all my frustrations with my job. The cruddy pay, long hours, stupid rules, inconsiderate customers, bad managers, everything. It had to die, and I had to be the one who killed it. I was on a quest to right the world, rid it of this cellular evil.

  I scooped it up, taking it out of the Genius Room. A couple of people followed me into the men’s room, where I filled the sink with water.

  Nobody said a word as I dropped it in. If the paperwork hadn’t said anything about damage, it didn’t say anything about liquid damage either, so I figured I might as well.

  The little bastard starting buzzing again, vibrating across the bottom of the sink.

  BUZZZZZ. BUZZZZZ—

  It stopped.

  The next morning, my inventory guy said he needed me to explain a few things.

  So Much Porn

  One of the applications that draws PC users to the Mac is iPhoto. For good reason, too. With a fluid interface, iPhoto lets users store their digital photographs in albums, sort them by date and events, and even tag them by place and by the people in the photos. iPhoto is often used by Apple and Apple fans to lure PC users in to switching to the Mac.

  When migrating a Windows user’s data to his or her new Mac, Geniuses usually get asked two or three times about the photos. “They’ll be safe, right?” the customer always asks. “It’s my only copy of those photos!”

  After ensuring the customer that we were competent enough with Windows to make sure the transfer would go smoothly, we’d get started moving data.

  Here’s something important to know: iPhoto has a “feature” Geniuses wish it didn’t: it shows thumbnails of the images its importing. Because it does this, when someone’s porn library gets moved, it’s awkward and imposing at best. At worst, it’s sickening.

  While I was fortunate enough never to have to deal with anything illegal like child pornography on a computer, I saw far too many naked people flash by on new Macs. From homemade naked snapshots to extensive catalogs of professional porno, just about anything you can imagine is filed away in someone’s iPhoto library.

  One time, I saw photos of a dude in a chicken suit nailing a lady who had to weigh 300 pounds.

  It was horrific. All I could eat for a month was salad.

  One staff member, helping a woman figure out how to play a batch of Windows Media files on her iMac, accidentally showed her husband’s poorly hidden stash of videos.

  Whoops.

  One Saturday, I had a guy with a PowerBook come to the Bar with a question about websites. “I’ve got a site I need to use that doesn’t load in Safari,” he said.

  Safari was fairly new at the time, so I believed him without even looking into the issue and started to download Firefox for him.

  “When this finishes, launch it and test out that site,” I said, assuming he was having issues with something like webmail or online banking.

  I went back to my other customer, and after a few minutes, checked in on the browser guy. I came around the corner of the Bar, to discover that he was surfing porn in Firefox, as happy as he could be.

  I shut the laptop on his hands. As he started to protest, I cut him off and said “Seriously?! You can’t do this at my Bar. There are kids in here!”

  The Genius Bar taught me how little shame some people have — and how bad people are at hiding their secrets.

  The Smoking G5

  In 2006, Apple moved the Macintosh product line from PowerPC processors to chips made by Intel. This meant Apple could ship thinner, more powerful machines, as Intel chips (as a general rule) take less power and generate less heat than their PowerPC cousins. For example, Apple was unable to ship a laptop built around the G5 processor because the G5 simply gave off too much heat to s
queeze into a laptop form factor.

  Apple introduced the PowerMac G5 in June 2003. It was much faster than anything before it — a big upgrade from the Mirrored Drive Door Power Mac G4.

  However, when Apple shoehorned the chip into the iMac in 2004, the G5 started developing a bad reputation. The iMac G5 (like the eMac and several PC models on the market at the time) suffered from faulty capacitors on the logic board that would leak or even burst after some time. The issue originated with the capacitor manufacturers, not Apple, but customers who came to the Bar with video distortion or machines that wouldn’t power on usually said something about how hot their machines felt after a few hours of usage, blaming the issue on the heat produced by the G5 chips.

  Sadly, some lesser-informed Geniuses went along with the theory.

  Those of us who worked as Geniuses at the time got really, really good at replacing the logic board and power supply in the pre-iSight iMac G5s. To this day, I think I could do one in under 20 minutes.

  In 2005, the PowerMac G5’s reputation started to be called in to question as well. To offset the growing heat and energy requirements of dual G5 processors (and even dual processors with two cores each), Apple started shipping some models with liquid cooling systems in place of more conventional heat sinks and fans. Additionally, some of the later G5 towers required kilowatt power supplies to run everything.

  That’s an awful lot of power for a desktop computer. Customers whose G5 towers were powered all the time saw their electric bills increase significantly due to these machines.

  The later, more powerful G5’s proved to be less reliable than previous PowerMacs due to the increased power requirements and intense heat they created. It seemed like whenever a G5 processor died, it was determined to take something else with it. Often, if a processor failed, the logic board and/or the power supply had to be replaced as well.

  This, combined with the awkward layout of the components inside the G5’s tower enclosure, made troubleshooting and repairing these computers quite frustrating. Often, a repair would require multiple parts, and it would take several days of mixing and matching old parts with new to figure out the right combination to get the machine going again.

  One night, one of the Geniuses I worked with fashioned a white flag and taped it on a pile of parts that belonged to a customer’s computer. My guess is that he did some heavy drinking when he got home.

  The liquid-cooled models introduced another layer of pain. If a machine’s coolant system developed a leak, very often lots of parts would need to be replaced — including the case itself in extreme situations — as the coolant used was corrosive to aluminum, and would actually burn through other internal components. It was a mess.

  One day, I answered a customer’s call on the phone. “My computer filled my house with smoke,” he bellowed, clearly upset.

  “I am sorry to hear that,” I said. “Will you be bringing in your G5 today?”

  There was a pause, and I could tell he was trying to figure out how I knew which Mac model he was calling about.

  Nearly Tragic Data Loss

  Data loss is a part of working with technology. The cold hard fact is this: if you have data on a computer, at some point, you’re going to lose some of it.

  Hard drive failures, like car crashes, are inevitable. Hard drives have spinning platters and fast-moving arms. Like all things with small moving parts, they are very fragile, almost designed to fail.

  As you can imagine, Geniuses have to give people bad news about their drives (and their data) all the time.

  Understandably, most users take this news pretty hard, but one woman’s story still sticks with me to this day.

  Her name was Susan. She was a middle-aged woman who had a 15-inch PowerBook with a hard drive that sounded like a tin full of rocks going though a clothes dryer.

  Even though I could guess the problem as soon as I heard the grinding noise, I went ahead and went through the motions of troubleshooting it. I booted her PowerBook from an external drive, opened Disk Utility and … nothing. The drive wouldn’t repair and when I attempted to mount it, the machine locked up.

  Sadly, my gut was right — the drive was toast, putting her data out of the grasp of the tools I had as a Genius.

  As I began to break the news to her, she started sobbing, and before long she was full-on crying. A little crying wasn’t unusual at the Bar, but this different. I could tell she’d lost more than just a term paper or some work project.

  Susan was falling apart, right there in the Apple Store.

  After she calmed down, Susan explained that her children had been killed in a car accident a few years prior. She had all the photos of her small children on the hard drive. Pictures from her pregnancies were gone. Photos of birthday parties and opening presents on Christmas were gone.

  Watching her cry, I realized that she was re-living the pain of losing her children.

  Like most Mac users at that time, she had no backup of her files. Even before the days of Time Machine, as a Genius, the natural tendency was to have a “tough luck” worldview when it came to data loss. It was easy to look at customers who lost data and not feel any pity, figuring that they had gotten themselves into that position by not having a backup of their data.

  I operated with that mindset a lot of the time. I think it’s fair to say most Geniuses do.

  Obviously, in a case like Susan’s, none of that applied. To feel anything but pity and sadness would have been plain wrong.

  This woman had already been through so much, and it seemed cruel of the universe to have added this, too.

  Susan’s appointment was a prime example of just how emotional being a Mac Genius could be at times. On one hand, I knew that she should’ve backed up the pictures if they were the only copies she had, but on the other, I wanted Apple to cover the cost of the repair and data recovery, just to make her life a little easier. Really, I just wanted to let this woman cry on my shoulder.

  Sadly, at that point, my hands were tied. When a hard drive is in such bad shape, the only hope for retrieving the data is to send the drive to a hardware data recovery company. The process has a mixed rate of success, and is very expensive, but it was Susan’s only hope. She didn’t even blink when I told her how much it was going to cost her.

  Against all odds, Susan’s story ended well. The company was able to recover her photos successfully, and she came back in six weeks later for us to help her set up a backup solution for the future.

  She was incredibly lucky that her data was recoverable, but I knew it was wrong to frame things in that light. Instead, I celebrated with her at her follow-up appointment. I was genuinely happy that she had the photos of her children back. We were able to connect on a personal level, despite the fact that the Genius Bar was, ultimately, a business. Her story could’ve been much worse — I’m just thankful it wasn’t.

  While her story has a happy ending, Susan was not alone in coming to the Genius Bar with lost data.

  The most common form of data loss I saw was by people with iPods. Users would fill them up, then delete (or lose) the songs from their computers.

  One such customer seemed like he would be a cool guy. He came in wearing a designer t-shirt and had a cross tattooed on his forearm.

  When I told him his iPod’s hard drive had failed, he asked me about the songs on it. As I explained that the files were gone, and that iTunes only synced with iPods one way anyways, he got less and less cool, until finally he started yelling at me.

  Now, this was my very first day behind the Genius Bar. I had no idea how to handle this situation. Thankfully, my boss heard what was going on, and handled things, telling the guy he couldn’t yell at me just because he lost his data.

  After the guy left, my manager told me to grow some balls.

  “He’s Spying On Me”

  All Mac power users should be familiar with the Activity Monitor. It’s an invaluable tool for troubleshooting Mac OS X.

  In addition to applica
tions being run by users (like Keynote or iCal) Activity Monitor can also be used to see software processes being run by OS X itself. These usually have unusual names, like “launchd,” “kernel_task,” or “SyncServicesAgent.”

  One called WindowServer usually catches the eyes of novice users simply because of its name, even though it’s completely unrelated to Microsoft’s operating system. WindowServer is the process OS X uses to draw the user interface on the screen. Force quitting it will immediately log the user out of the computer.

  Our Genius Bar had a repeat customer who knew just enough about Activity Monitor to launch it and be confused by it. She was a middle-aged divorcée who owned an iMac G5.

  I had no idea what her ex-husband was like, but I assume from my interactions with her the situation between them was far from good.

  She was a nice enough lady, but she was easily spooked. Every few months, she found something new in Activity Monitor and she’d come to the Bar worried. She turned off her computer at night, and unplugged her router when she wasn’t home.

  “He’s spying on me,” she would say, sliding printed-out screenshots of Activity Monitor across the Bar to me.

  “He uses Windows,” she would explain, pointing to WindowServer. “He’s really smart, and he’s hacked in to my Mac! Here’s the proof!”

  It was impossible to reason with her. This woman was not willing (or able) to hear my explanations for what she was seeing.

  She wasn’t the only paranoid customer I saw come in to the Store. One guy in his mid-30’s would often come in with his PowerBook opened to Activity Monitor, worried about everything he saw being run by the “root” user.

  On Unix-based systems like OS X, as you may know, the root user is used by the OS itself to run processes and services that are available to all logged-in users. For example, one of Time Machine’s processes is named backupd. Since Time Machine runs no matter which user is logged in, it is handled by the Root user.

  Since they’re mostly obscure background tasks, most of the names of processes being run by the root user are difficult to read — things like “prl_disp_service” and “syslogd” abound.