My mac book is a lemon. It crashes so frequently I feel like it is running Windows 95. If that weren’t bad enough the case on my 2 month old laptop has developed two rather serious cracks. Being that we are a block away from Apple’s SoHo store I figured I would walk it over to the Genius Bar myself. The Genius Bar requires an appointment which is easily made online. I arrived at 11:35 (10 minutes before my appointment as advised by the website). Behind the genius’ heads are video monitors that cycle between helpful tips and a list of the next 12 people in the queue. It took until noon before my name appeared at number 12. At this point I began to wonder why Apple, who took my email address and mobile phone number to make my appt., couldn’t send me a text or email to let me know that they were running late. By 12:45 I was up to #3 on the list and then suddenly disappeared. When I approached Katherine, one of the geniuses and asked her where I had gone.

“you were deleted from the list because you never checked in”.

“Huh?! Where does it say that I need to check in?”

“Sorry we really do need a sign.” Apparently the video monitors are over taxed already with the queue list and the how to reset your iPod tutorial.

Katherine made me a new appointment for 3 minutes later. A second later I was back up on the screen at the #2 spot. 30 seconds later I was gone again. Why?

“Sorry nobody checked you in for this appointment so it was cancelled”.

At this point Katherine dropped convention and allowed me to be seen without an appointment.

The geniuses were able to fix all of my problems if only I was willing to leave the computer with them for 7 business days. I guess I will bring it back the next time a window of that length opens in my schedule.