Corkish and ex-Corkish Fruit Salad

Saturday, May 13, 2006

"Life After AppleCare" ends up in Slashdot

Wow. People end up in Slashdot too... Only for working in AppleCare. Interesting.
So this guy worked for AC in Austin. I just don't get how working as a tech support is worth slashdot first page headlines.

Weird stuff in his blog; "I recently started a column on Mac Geekery where I detail my experiences as a Mac Genius and share my thoughts on the Mac-related news of the moment. I figured I'd get a fair amount of traffic, but after getting links from LifeHacker, Digg, and TUAW, things really took off. In the end, several fellow former Geniuses chimed in with a little input, too. I also didn't realize how common it is for Mac Geniuses to go off on their own after working as a Genius - the number of ACNs among us is staggering" - wait, so a phone monkey, or a mac genius? If you were supporting servers as the blog first says, what mac genius? They don't support the servers on the retail side. Nevertheless, getting on the first page of slashdot for sure made his 15 minutes of fame. Nice photos he has however on his personal blog.

Snippets:

I worked in Austin's AppleCare center for four and a half years as a desperation move after a programming gig decided they'd rather give it a go without me several months earlier and my severance and unemployment checks stopped paying the bills.

All told, the job wasn't really challenging. I found myself coming in to work late, getting in from lunch late, missing breaks, etc. All the classic signs of being completely tired of the job. So I went to my manager and said, "I know servers. How do I get into that team?" A few weeks later there was an opening and I was told to interview.

(I wonder has anyone done that in Cork? Be late enough, and get sacked. Period)

That's a damn fine spread of Macintosh knowledge that you don't see very often at all. That's also the range of topics that the higher members of Apple technical support have. There is no specialization. And yet, with all of those skills (and more), we received phone center wages and the regular abuse of people whose jobs we should have.
(Again - the guys on the other side of the pond support only servers. Or only desktops, or only portables, or only pro audio, or only pro video, or even only iPods. Not the whole range of everything as here. So if needing to troubleshoot the servers, the same guy would still do all Logic and Final Cut troubleshooting here. And in more than English, with less).

The Apple Retail Store opened in Austin during my first career-induced depression and I applied and fought like hell for it. I worked my way to the final interview on that one, only to get passed over for other transfers. I tried hanging around, making my name known, all the fun tricks, but nothing came of it. Time and again I applied as Genius openings came up and got nothing. Well, almost nothing. One day I did, actually, get a call back from them for the job, complete with an offer. This was right around the end of the year and their offer was below my new salary after a respectable raise from a mid-year job change. This was also after they slid the Genius scale back quite a bit, too. Needless to day, more work for less money is something I try to avoid, so I did.
(There it goes. So he wasn't a Mac Genius, nor in Barton Creek, nor elsewhere).

And a chapter called Life Inside AppleCare that does not mention at all the inside the company relationships? Heh.