Last month, I invited Apple employees to send me funny stories, and they did not disappoint. (The invitation still stands, so please drop me a line!) Here are three of my favorites so far.
This isn't brick and mortar, it's glass and steel. Pseudonymous Apple Store employeeJ. K. Appleseed takes you backstage at Apple Retail, the supercollider of human expectations and consumer technology.
The Pickup Artist
submitted by 007
I gave a One-to-One lesson to a young man I'll call Jonah. He dressed like a prep. I don't think he looked old enough to be in college. So, while his laptop is booting up, he asks me how my love life is. I say none of his business and flash my wedding ring. He tells me he's a pickup artist. He wants to build a website to advertise his pickup artist lessons. He didn't have any clients yet.
Jonah looks around at my co-workers. Most are geeks. He tells me he could teach any one of them to pick up any "fox" they wanted. Jonah never calls women anything but "foxes." I didn't have the heart to tell him the guy he was pointing to? Gay.
Jonah wants to put a photograph on his website's front page. I think, good idea. Like one of those testimonials, "This is me. If I can get the foxes, so can you!" Instead, what he's got is a cheesy screenshot of a woman he tells me is a Playboy Playmate he took out on a date.
Once Jonah slept with her, which he said he "hoped to accomplish soon," he would be in a position to advise others how to do the same. I thought, this guy needs more help than I know how to give in a one-to-one.
The next week Jonah got my co-worker, Fred. I made sure to situate my own appointment nearby because I wanted to hear how things went. A minute later, Fred busts out laughing, and we all turn to look. Fred waves that it's all right and regains his composure.
"Listen, kid." Fred says. "Thanks, but no thanks. I've forgotten more about dating than you will ever know!"
Happy New Year
submitted by Qwerty
Five minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve, a few blocks from Times Square, a homeless man with a dazed look in his eyes wandered into our Apple Store. The Geniuses on overnight duty eyed him warily as he zigzagged his way to the person checking-in customers. When a genius called out the next appointment's name, that man stumbled toward the bar. Waves of odor washed over so hard that neighboring Geniuses had to hold their breath. You could smell a decade of the city on the man. He pulled out a brand new iPod touch and set it on the bar. We relaxed a bit. It all seemed legit. Then, he pulled out a jar of his own urine and set that on the bar beside the iPod.
Stuck
submitted by Asdfg
A customer came up to me and put a MacBook, an iPod, and aUSB cable on the table.
"I need your help," he said.
"Sure," I said. "How can I help you?"
"I was copying a song from my computer to my iPod," he said.
"Okay."
"But it never got there."
"Do you want to try it again?"
"We can't, because the song's not on the computer anymore."
"Oh."
"It's not on my iPod, either."
He hands me the USB cable and says, "It must be stuck in here. Can you get it out for me?'
This post has been excerpted from pseudonymous Apple Store employee J.K. Appleseed's McSweeney's column, Retail Therapy. To read the article in its entirety, head on over to McSweeney's here.
Image: Shutterstock/1000 Words
This article was republished with permission from McSweeney's and is the fourth in an ongoing column series.