I-Appointment

My girl­friend loves H&M. 

Personally, on my list of cloth­ing stores it doesn’t really rank very high, either for my shop­ping or for hers. For my own part, they don’t usu­ally have my size, and as far as stores I go to with her, it has a num­ber of draw­backs. First and fore­most there isn’t a boyfriend bench — an area where I can com­fort­ably sit down and wait for her to try on clothes, give my opin­ion from time to time and play with my Blackberry. 

So a cou­ple days ago when she men­tioned that I should meet her at H&M, I knew I would have some time to kill. To make mat­ters worse, my Blackberry has been act­ing up lately — stalling, hav­ing trou­ble pro­cess­ing tweets and gen­er­ally not per­form­ing up to its usual stan­dards. Two doors down from H&M is the Apple store, and given the geri­atric state of my phone I thought I might as well take the oppor­tu­nity to look at an iPhone. Some friends have given me rave reviews, but my biggest con­cern is send­ing emails. Having tried it a few times, I don’t trust that the thumbs that got me through hours and hours of Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter, are the right size to work such a small touch screen.

So while my beloved was at the shock rock, party palace, run by the future fash­ion­istas of tomor­row, I saw my oppor­tu­nity to go talk to some­body about get­ting a new phone. When I walked into the brightly lit Apple store, I was very impressed with the sheer num­ber of sales­peo­ple. In par­tic­u­lar, they were using the Wal-Mart model of a greeter at the front of the store. I approached the young, geeky-looking twenty-something and asked who I would talk to about an iPhone. 

Dressed in a bright blue turquoise shirt, and hold­ing a clip­board, he seemed like the kind of guy who was about to grad­u­ate with a degree in com­puter sci­ence. “Do you have an appoint­ment?” he asked. 

“A what?” I was a lit­tle bit con­fused. Usually I’m used to just walk­ing into a store and let­ting some over-eager sales­per­son walk me through all the things I don’t want or don’t need. We’re in the mid­dle of an eco­nomic reces­sion. The fact that I’m even con­sid­er­ing an iPhone should be enough for this guy to help me learn all about the iPhone, and why I can no longer draw a breath with­out one. 

“Do you have an appoint­ment, sir?” 

“No,” I said I as I tried to remind myself not to sound angry. Maybe this was some new sales tech­nique, based on some weird form of reverse psy­chol­ogy.… If that was the case, it wasn’t working. 

“Well we do have an open­ing later on. We sched­ule you one in about an hour. The appoint­ments for an iPhone are 45 min­utes to an hour long.”

“You’re shit­ting me.”

“Well, no sir. Our appoint­ments usu­ally book up fast. Are you plan­ning to buy the phone today?” 

“No, I was plan­ning to look at one with some help from a sales­per­son while my girl­friend is next door at H&M. I only have 15 min­utes or so, so if you could go find me some­body to help me out that would be really great.” 

He’s clearly dis­ap­pointed, but nods and walks off. He heads for the back of the store, walks through a door and then comes back. “Somebody will be with you in 5 to 10 mins.” My girl­friend shows up .  .  .

“Well do you have a card or some­thing? Cause I can’t do this right now. I have to go”

He hands me a white card with a sil­ver Apple logo: 

Jason
Apple Store
Specialist