More Adventures in Humility
July 15th, 2004Here’s me walking into the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner the other day. Thinking that my mother was in the market for a computer, I wanted to see if they had any current generation iMacs’s available. It’s a sordid tale, but the online store seems to be going through an unprecedented (if nearly unforgivable) botch-up in operations, making the computer unavailable online for the next three months. It’s a long shot, but as long as I’m there…
To my astonishment walking in, I spot six iMacs springing up from some tables, like a bed of sunflowers just ripe for the picking. “Oh, boy,” I think to myself, holding back the excitement. With the air of possibility now fresh in my mind, I dart to the nearest one and immediately start playing with it. The mouse feels good. The screen look great. Surely, my mom would like this better than that atrociously bulky eMac.
Looking at the monitor, though, I notice that I’m not seeing the usual Garagband demo running. Instead, I see a foreign-looking screen with the word “POS” somewhere in the application title. Thinking for a second that I might not be an idiot, I turn to my left for full moronic confirmation. There before me was a Apple employee wearing the distinct emblem T-shirt, smiling to a customer and using his iMac as a Point of Sale register. Without knowing better, I had inadvertently stepped into the checkout counter and was potentially making a total ass of myself. Slyly, I stepped away, making an immediate b-line for the digital cameras.
Though nobody noticed, I can’t help but feel some embarrassment from the incident. To their (and my own) credit, though, the store employees keep the counters so incredibly clean, they honestly look like anything but a checkout area.
So, I guess I’ll be giving that eMac another look after all.