Apple and Me: Bellying Up to the Genius Bar

If you happened to drop by Goin' Down to Mama's right after I bought my iPhone, you know that Siri and I are having communication issues. Call it cultural differences. Bless her heart, the girl doesn't have a drawl--and she struggles to interpret one accurately. Still, I respect her desire to help me text, and so we are in counseling and working through our difficulties. And now on to my laptop. I used to think it just a tad pretentious that Apple refers to its customer service desk as the "Genius Bar."  However, when your Macbook Pro--your right arm, your primary creative outlet and source of much-needed income--when this machine that has become a virtual appendage breaks down, you do not think to yourself, "I should probably get that fixed." No, what you think to yourself is more like this: "Code Mac! Code Mac! Call 911! Get a chopper in here! We've gotta airlift her to the mall!!" Clutching my ailing computer and waiting for my turn at the Genius Bar felt very much like those nervous few minutes I once spent in Admissions at St. Vincent's, waiting to set up my knee surgery. (I would not have been at all surprised if the nice young man behind the Genius Bar had asked me, "Does your Mac have any allergies that you know of? Is there any chance your Mac could be pregnant? Does it have a living will?") When they called my name, I glanced around to see if there were any loved ones in the waiting area to accompany me, but no, I had to take that long walk to the Genius Bar alone. "We're going to take just a minute here and run some diagnostics," said the young man--who did, indeed, look like a Mac genius. As he examined my Mac, other technicians kept coming up to him, asking for consults, so I suspect he was chief of surgery at the Apple store. In the end, he recommended a rather invasive procedure and admitted my laptop for treatment. "What's that gonna cost?" I asked, with a quiver in my voice. "Not a thing," he said. "You're under warranty." That's what he said. But like Siri, when I speak to her, I heard something different. What I heard was: "Don't worry, ma'am, you've got Major Medical."

Comments

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