One Bad Apple

I’m leaning against the Genius Bar in an Apple Store staring at a frumpy, scraggly bearded, fifty-something waving a metallic-pink iPhone around in his left hand as he lurches two steps forwards and backwards, teaching a class on how to use the iPhone13 to absolutely nobody. 

Upon the Apple-cool-but-uncomfortable benches set up for the class sits not a single human arse. 

Still, Nobody’s-Genius is undeterred. 

He just keeps lurching around on his cheap-already-burst-hiking-boots, waving the phone with such Apple-sized-overconfidence that I wonder if it’s a display of public humiliation for my generation; retribution for our inherent just-make-the-fucken-thing-work-Luddite-ness. 

They have him wired up, with a microphone snaking out of his exhausted hair and halfway across his beard, but the Acoustics Gods – still mad that Ear Pods prevent ninety-nine percent of the human population, and four percent of cats, from hearing anything other than what Apple determined was profitable to them – dictate that even though I’m just fifteen feet away, the only audible sound is Nobody’s-Genius’ frequent restart of his conversation with no one in a microphone-breathy: “And again ….” 

Off he mumblingly rambles, eyes maniacally animated, the rose-gold (Apple’s tran$lation of metallic-pink) colored phone arcing in a slow, absurd wave to nobody.

I strain my shamefully Ear-Podless ears to listen to what I hope to be both valuable and generationally understandable advice, as I imagine Apple would only stand up a Genius to teach us how to get full use from a device so expensive that it ranks, an albeit far, second, behind buying a car, in the purchases a regular human makes every few years. 

Of course, these days our planet is home to less and less regular humans.  Indeed, several of the irregularly wealthy humans have started searching elsewhere in the universe for places to build, at minimum wages of course, fancy new digs.

Just then my fifteen-year-old Personal-Genius emerges from the really-smart-if-not-actual-Genius storeroom, a phony sales-smile frozen across his face as he holds aloft a trim, multicolored cardboard box that costs a mere thousand plus dollars.  If you folded up fifty twenty dollar bills you wouldn’t get them all into this box without Andrew Jackson himself shedding a few, exceedingly well earned, tears of his own.

“Now Jo…seph,” he says chirpily. 

We, … well actually I, have tried repeatedly, but the fact that the name on my Apple account is Joseph cannot be overcome and thus Joe gets iconverted to Jo…seph.

“When was the last time you backed up your phone?” he continues in a machine-learningly flat tone.

“Oh Jay…sys!” I say through a long Covid-unfriendly exhale, preparing to, in the way regular humans do, lie and confuse my way out of this one. 

“I think I started a back up last weekend, but then I had to take the dog to his singin’ lesson, an’ there he got bitten be a piranha, who wasn’t there for singin’, the piranha’s a tap dance….” 

The lack of inflection on my Personal-Genius’s face makes it clear, he’s havin’ none of my ould shite talk.

I fall silent, only to be interrupted by a stray “And again ….”

“I’d say it ‘twas a while awright, maybe a mon…year or more?”

“Let us see.”

Being much better accustomed to getting a good old fashioned verbal flailing for my moral shortcomings in not doing something I shoulda, I’m unsure how to react.

“May I have your phone Jo…seph?” he asks, his small, pale palm unfolding.

Reluctantly I hand him my primary connection with the rest of the planet.

What if he disappears into the really-smart-storeroom with it and never returns?

All my oh-so-cool-n’-unique music collection – which used to take up actual space in the house until a trash-bag full of CDs got left outside a Thrift Shop early one Sunday morning – would disappear out the back door the Apple store, never to be heard again! 

My Apps that issue sports results – probly before they actually occur; that’s how smart Apple is – all gone: I’d be in last-to-know sports results hell!

The other apps that tell me the names of birds by their sounds and the names of trees via a simple photograph of a leaf – propelling me to be second place on the Greatest Bore Index after Al Gore – gone because this man-child wants to steal my antique phone!

“Eh, Jo…seph,” his hesitates, his staidness finally rattled.  “This is a rather older model, and the battery is quite low, it may be that ….”

“I’m kind of a rather older model meself,” I nod a lot in vociferous agreement, “and my battery is kinda low too.”

“Oh … yes, I didn’t, eh… mean, maybe we should plug this in … to power, … you know electricity.”

“Yes, yes, I have heard of elec…tricity.  That lad Tesla, he was involv….”

“Oh no Jo…seph,” he frowns, just a little, “Apple and Tesla, though both awesome technology companies are not in any way related.”

The problem with being a confirmed Luddite is that the Luddites lost the war against technology before it began way back in eighteenth century.  Their breaking apart of a handful of mills was barely a bump on the road in the rush to full scale, exploitative capitalism.  Thus, my reluctance to getting dragged clicking and screaming into the twenty-first century is entirely quixotic – yet I persist.  Probably it’s just my inherent resistance to change arising from years of the uncontrolled change known as aging. 

It wasn’t always this way.  I do remember eons ago being excited to borrow a work “car phone.”  This particular piece of technology was the size of a shoebox and required distinctly positive pressure on the dialing buttons for any response.  But as laws about getting distracted by your phone were twenty years in the future, who cared if it took five minutes of nail-whitening stabs at the handset to make one call – the shock on the other end when you said, “yeah, I’m callin’ from the car” was more than worth it.

We quickly moved on from car phones, downsizing to cell phones merely the size of bricks (that came with their own powerplants), with everything getting smaller and sleeker over time.  Though after 9/11, I was issued a Nextel phone that looked and operated like the radios the first astronauts used to speak all the way from the moon back to … Texas?  Or maybe that was something I heard in a bar one morning. 

On and on technology goes, burrowing ever deeper into our miserable existence, often promulgating its own brand of misery.  Long gone are the days when an ould fella sitting in the stands at one inter-county GAA match and listening to another on a transistor radio was considered “a wee bit odd.” 

Now, if we so choose, and I’m pretty sure a few did, we can watch a scoreless FA Cup Final while sitting on the hopper. 

Could it possibly be that the zenith of technological evolution is a human male jammed into a Liverpool shirt, plomped on the throne, expending zero calories on bowel movement planning, as he watches an inch sized Mo Salah not score for two hours?

And if this is the top of ihill, how come none of this got mentioned in the Bible?

Many years ago, when happy Neanderthals came to work, sitting in the corner was a lonely, beige computer, which got fired up only for specifically complex tasks.  If the computer was “down,” which it was more often than not, then this required a land line phone-call that summoned, weeks later, a portly, bald man, with a key of enormous proportions clipped to a belt loop.  This laconic man allegedly had worked for NASA, the CIA or both, was there to fix the computer with impossibly small tools.  Meanwhile we Neanderthals had gotten on with our work, completing in a few days what the computer would have done, perhaps too precisely, in an hour.  No one complained about “the computer’s down” delay or if they did, you just took an extra deep drag of your cigarette and, through a mouthful of exhaled smoke, told them to “go fuck yourself.” 

Before the plague we had “progressed” to the point, that if one’s computer was “down,” then no work got done.  For the sake of coworker morale, it became necessary to wear an I’m-so-bored-waiting-for-IT sour face all day.  Finally, a portly, prematurely balding, twenty-something with a suspiciously large key chain hanging from his washed-too-many-times khakis, shows up, restarts your computer a bunch of times until it “gets fixed.”  All the while, he’s hands behind head, tipping backwards in your chair, talking too much as he recounts how much better things were when he worked at Best Buy. 

During the plague … well, without a computer you simply didn’t exist. 

You were a non-person:  A void in hyperspace:  An “who is dot-dot-dot 2987?  Turn on your camera – it’s like you’re a stalker!”

During this precarious time for human existence, with the finest scientific minds around the world striving to find a vaccine to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, and a portly, balding guy – who allegedly worked for NASA, th… you get it – in Milwaukee trying to extract scientific data from hibernating bears for use in inventing a patented-call-before-the-top-of-the-hour product to prevent bedsores for all those condemned to binge-watching streamed series while horizontal, I fell victim to a computer disaster. 

Rather my ten-year-old Mac fell victim.  Now I acknowledge that in computer years, this Mac is essentially one hundred-years-old and if your one-hundred-year-old grandfather fell down the cellar stairs, you wouldn’t blame the bottle of bourbon he just consumed – right?  Yet I did, with standard human frailty and selfishness, personally blame Apple for this failure.  

As I was not able to get online and bellow to the world about the victimization under which I was being victimized, I had to swallow my fake pride, and real vitriol, and phone Apple’s 800 number.  This was a delicate situation, as the problem was not actually with the centenarian computer but with its … ahem, mouse. 

When did we all agree that this, the oddest, part of the computer experience had to be named after a rodent?  Couldn’t it just be called the handjo…, eh, well, we’ll leave it as mouse for now, but we definitely need to form a “select com…mittee” to deal with this pestilent naming.

Now call center adventures are for another day, another rant, but for today, let’s just say I got a perky, if somewhat gravelly voiced (ten, twenty, thirty cigarettes a day? Does anyone confess to smoking anymore?  Let along the number actually smoked?) African American woman of approximately the same ancient-in-technology-years age as my Luddite-self.

“Now da ya’ll perfer Josuph or Joe?” she asks, in a quaintly human way.

“Joe is gud,” I answer.

“Gud, ‘cause I wuz gonna call ya Joe anyways ‘cause my brother is a Joe an’ we don’t truck with nunna that ‘Josuph’ sh…stuff at…all.”

“Great,” I breath out a relaxing sigh.

“Now, how ken I he’p ya today, Joe?”

“Well, my mouse is not workin’ ….”
“Howdya mean it aint workin’?  I mean does it not move, not click or whot?”

“Yeah, all of the above.  It’s a wireless mouse and this morning it just kinda

disappeared of the screen.”

“Oh Joe, what’d ya do?  Did ya drop it or pour coffee on it or sumptin?”

“I wish,” I sigh again.  “It’s lucky I didn’t fire it inta the wall.”

 “I know, I know, but don’t worry Joe, we’ll git ya up n’ runnin’ in a few minutes.  Now, here’s what ya gotta do, is you ta use t’arrows, ya know t’little arrows on the side there.  Use ‘em to git us to Preferences on your computer, so’s I ken log in an’ see whats ahappenin.”

Together, with shared frustration, we determine that the arrows are not a substitute for the missing rodent, there’s simply too many actions required.

“Ok, ok, Joe, don’t panic, let’s not panic, aint nuthin’ evers a gained by apanickin’,” she breaths in fast.  “Now let … me … see.”

“Eh …,” I start, then stop myself so I can fashion a comfortably confusion lie-question.  “How long should ya keep a computer.”

“Oh well,” she breathes out, happy no doubt for a break in solving my stupid problem.  “Generally, they’re done after five years, but I a’ways swap mines out after three.  Cuz I don’t want no problems like this.”

“Yeah,” I lie-agree, wondering if she can tell from the serial number I provided at the start of the call that together we’re frustratingly trying to solve a problem for a ten year old computer.  

“Ok Joe, how’s about this,” she comes back with a burst of energy.  “Ya’ll got an old mouse anywhere’s else ya cud use?”

“No,” I answer mournfully.  “I mean not an Apple mouse.  I have another species, a Microsoft, ya know, a not-Apple computer mouse.”

 “Oh yeah, that’ll work Joe, Bill Gates wuz cool with Steve Jobs, he shares he’s mice with ‘im.  Jus’ go on ahead plug in.”

I follow here directions and my dinosaur of an Apple reacts to this affront by immediately showing a message: “PAIRING WITH WIRELESS MOUSE.”

Problem solved.

Turns out computers have egos that bruise just as easily as humans: Machine learning is getting a little too good!

“See Joe, I tol’ ya we cud use a little common sense ta solve the problem, course ya’ll know that common sense aint so common no more.”

Meanwhile back in the Apple store, things are not quite as calm and quick-profitable as iCorporate-Culture would like. 

My elderly iPhone is now on Apple-life-support on the Genius Bar.  It’s been lulled to a restful sleep in the moisturized hands of Apple-Geniuses and is now plugged into Make-America-Grate-Again coal powered electricity.  It’s showing some signs of life – though the white Apple wakeup-icon is blinking wildly in distinct defiance of normal SOP.

Nobody’s-Genius is still going strong, blissfully undeterred by the ongoing dearth of students in front of him.

“Eh, excuse me,” I say to my Personal-Genius.

He turns his eyes from staring incredulously at my phone to staring incredulously at me.

“Is this class …,” I nod towards Nobody’s-Genius, “being filmed or recorded or … something.”

I wave at the empty seats.

“Eh, … no, this is a … scheduled class.  It’s scheduled for this Apple Store on Apple-dotcom … but the users are simply not availing themselves of the free education.”

“So, he’s just …,” I shake my head slowly and pay closer attention to what Nobody’s-Genius is saying. 

But the Acoustic Gods are resolute in their vindictiveness and all I get is another “And again ….”

Everything he’s doing with his pink iPhone, gets broadcasted onto the ten-foot by ten-foot wall of screens behind him.  Thus, when he taps Photos on the home screen, the wall of screens immediately fills with a significantly larger than life photo of a blond, tanned, smiling faced, beautiful young woman.  The photo is tagged as being taken over three months ago in … Hollywood. 

I’m not quite sure if that’s Hollywood in Wicklow or even Florida, but my non-iSmart-gut tells me it’s prolly that other wan, ya know, the wan way out yonder on the left coast.

Nobody’s-Genius keeps flicking through his photos, and it turns out he’s busy fella with a … lot of really good-looking young women friends, many of whom like to photographed in environmentally friendly, as in not much fabric used, bikinis in places like Santa Monica, Malibu, Laguna Beach.

I never woulda thunk it!  But now I’m thinking about growing a scraggly beard, whipping out my own old-crushed hiking boots … ya never know!

A little upset to the generally-required-iStaidness of the Genius Bar now gets indisputably registered when my personal-Genius squeaks loudly:

“Oh, my goodness Jo…seph!”

His bony shoulders try to pin back, but … there’s really no depth for them to go anywhere.

“Jo…seph the last back up on this device was literally on the same day that my youngest brother, Nathan, was born.  I remember that day so well, going to the hospital and the nurses being mean.  That was like … seven, I think he’s seven, so that’s seven years ago!”

 “Yeah,” I make my best fake-I’m-concerned-about-this-too grimace. 

“To be honest with ya, I ben kinda busy dealing with a rodent problem.”