First there was a sort of unresponsive area of my iPhone’s touchscreen, then it grew larger and more persistent; the lower-left corner where a lot of apps have vital buttons. Then months went by. Then I was like, do something about this & I called Apple Support & talked to a super-nice guy in India who set up an appointment at the downtown Brooklyn Apple Store Genius Bar.
Then I had a sense of foreboding. I left the house early in case the bus was wonky or I got lost, and I did get lost, and I did walk a long stretch on Flatbush Avenue trying not to get squashed by the cars pushing the light & blocking the box and it was hot, brutally hot with wind gusts that pushed grit onto my sweaty skin. Wow, I thought, New York is back.
Then I found the store, which I realized I recognized, albeit too late to have walked directly to. Then there was tape and stantions delineating a line to get in and there was a guy overseeing the line and he asked my name and then told me “the app” wouldn’t let him check me in until 10 minutes before my appointment, and it was maybe 17. So I went to the other side of the building where there was shade and squatted down because I felt faint. Until a guy started to bother me. So I went back to the line but “the app” still said I was too early and I stood in direct, blinding sun until “the app” deigned to let me in line, which was simply standing in the same direct sun, on the other side of the stantion.
I stood on my designated spot, on top of a sticker of feet affixed to the sidewalk, and I squatted again, almost feeling a need to lie prone. The line-monitor offered me a water, but I was far from home and afraid I would need to pee and not be able to find a public bathroom. I said “I just need to get inside.” On my left, behind glass, was a huge, high-ceilinged, almost empty, air-conditioned space.
The line monitor said I could go ahead and wait in a patch of shade by the door. There were three of us crowded into this tiny patch of shade, for various reasons.
I said something like “this is absurd; in the name of health someone is going to die of heat stroke.” “Well, six of one half-dozen of the other” said a woman standing also in the shade. “Not so much anymore,” I said “I think the risk is greater outside.”
The line, now to my left, moved forward, one by one being let into the store. After two people who had been behind me were let in, I said to the door guy. “Did I get bumped?” And immediately the woman occupying the same shade patch as me said “you were behind me” as though I were jumping the line. It turned out, obviously, that the door guy had just come on, and not communicated with the line guy, and we both got skipped.
In an effort to smooth the situation over, I said, “This is more convoluted than any club I’ve ever tried to get into” to which she tartly replied “There are worse things you could be experiencing.” I felt a wave of irrational rage so large I could hardly believe it. “Wow, you make a great point,” I said somewhat sarcastically. For the first time I understood and empathized with, I grokked, the rage of the anti-maskers. I was in the presence of a Covid Karen who was going to make sure I knew my problems didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
To drive home her point she said “Did you accept that water they offered you?” “No,” I said. “What a total fucking bitch I am, right?”
They called my name. The store was cool and empty. There was a Purell station I tried to decline, because I never use that shit and also Covid is not spread through surface contact so it was just more security theatre of the ilk that had just led to an altercation with a stranger, who I now hated with the force of a thousand suns, and for good measure now hated all white women, because we are the worst.
The inside-line monitor informed me that if I declined the Purell I would have to wear gloves. Wear gloves. Even my grocery store doesn’t make me Purell before placing my contaminated hands all over their merchandise. My hatred was now extending to Apple and the entire Apple ecosystem.
There were more stantions and another line inside, and again I squatted down because I really was dizzy, although now also from an unexpected burst of primal rage. Someone brought a chair over and again offered water; I declined both. Squatting is better, as weird as it might look. I recommend it.
This was my first time at the Genius Bar. Actually, in an Apple Store at all. I was unclear how much of this app-enabled folderol was due to Covid and how much to the rise of the machines.
A guy came and got me, the Genius himself.
We didn’t hit it off. His diagnostic told him there was no dead spot on the lower left-hand corner of my iPhone. He noted my software was several versions out of date & launched into a canned spiel about how software and hardware interact. I said the dead spot had been there throughout many software iterations. He asked me to show him, but I could not. The phone was also having sound issues, but the diagnostic said it was not. I felt gaslighted by the diagnostic software. I felt condescended to by the Genius.
“I guess that’s where the expression ‘the customer is always right’ comes from” he said. “Because to the customer, the problem is real.”**
“I don’t think that’s where the expression comes from,” I said, because I now disagreed with everything that had happened since I got on the bus to this godforsaken, sleek, impersonal, app-controlled hellhole.
He told me I should update my software and if I still had the problem he could make an appointment for me to speak to someone on the phone. I said I could do that myself, and he said “I’m sure you can” in a placating way. We understood a mutual animosity through our politeness.
I had told him I tend to be reluctant to install updates because it changes functionality (one time an update decided to place my photos in Folders I had not chosen and could not opt out of, one of which was “Selfies,” which I immediately realized would be used by domestic abusers — “who did you take this for?” “who did you send this to?” “why are you dressed like this?” etc — and immediately found [and it was not easy] an actual way to contact Apple product development and told them to get more women on the damn design team and earlier in the UX process, and the very next update the feature was disabled, although I am sure many many domestic violence groups got in touch with them over the issue).
He told me updates were mainly bug fixes and I sort of waved in the air like “shut up.”
I realized that not only were they not going to fix my iPhone but in fact imply the issue was all in my head and also my fault for not updating my iOS.
I realized that all of my interactions, save the one with the woman in line who believed I was insufficiently invested in preventing Covid, were scripted and driven by precise instructions and timetables, broadly and for our purposes to be called henceforth “the app.”
I realized that Apple was the instantiation of an unendurable future. One in which human discernment and compassion is replaced by narrowly proscribed — and rated — formulae concocted in corporation central and disseminated by “the app” and “the training” and “the script,” never to be deviated from, to the extent that customers may actually die of heat exhaustion just inches from, on the other side of the glass from, a vast, airy, entirely hard-surfaced, beautifully cool retail emporium, because no human who works there is empowered to deviate from procedure, on pain of losing their job.
Later today are forecast violent thunderstorms and 50-mile-per-hour wind gusts. Will the app allow the hapless line-waiters to seek shelter in the Apple Store? I genuinely doubt it.
- * after-the-fact realization that the credit for this title cadence goes to “Bad Times in Buenos Aires,” an expat memoir I absolutely loved https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/miranda-france/bad-times-in-buenos-aires/
- ** “the customer is always right” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right
