The Life in My Years

“Should we just go ahead and sign up for Apple TV?” I asked my wife, Cora. “It’s only ten bucks a month.”

“Sure why not.”

“Alright.” I answered. “The Giants are on Apple tonight, though I think it sucks that they’re starting to stream sports. Anyway, I’ve been wanting to watch Masters of the Air.”

I walked to the home office and let out a sigh of resignation. Signing up for anything Apple meant that I would have to eat a small helping of crow – feathers, beak, and all. You see, I don’t have a love/hate relationship with Apple. No, I have a hate/hate relationship with Apple. I’m a hater. Yes I’m a dyed in the wool, bonafide, 100% pure hater of all things Apple.

My animus isn’t so much directed at Apple’s products and services as it is towards the Apple cult. Yes – cult (not unlike the MAGA cult only technologically discerning), Ask anyone of us, scum of the Earth, proletariat, lowlife, trailer park trash who uses a Dell computer or, horrors, an Android phone. We’ve all at one time, or many times, been denigrated by some Apple – head for being antediluvian slime.

For me it started in the early 1990’s with a coworker named Chris Smith. Chris took in the Apple snake oil intravenously and he made certain that the other four of us in our little purchasing office knew that we Windows users were lesser beings. Chris had even managed to convince management to allow him to set up his own personal Apple based system for office use while the rest of us were on a Windows platform.

On any given workday, the slightest Windows hiccup resulted in derision from Chris, followed by an annoying cackle that sounded like a dyspeptic goose.

Every year, Chris would take two days off to attend the annual, Apple convention and Steve Jobs love fest, held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. So many idolaters would show up at Moscone to hear the apostle Steve Jobs deliver his homilies, that two blocks of Howard Street had to be closed off.

I never attended, of course, so I could only imagine what went on in that holy of holies. No Coors and chips there. No, I imagine they served oysters Rockefeller, tuna tartare, and of course Royal Beluga caviar. There was probably a 39 month aged Parmigiano-Reggiano served on slices of French baguette flown in from Paris which began as Cheese Whiz on Ritz until the apostle Steve transformed it by waving his staff and muttering a few divine incantations. Rumor had it that the Almighty Jobs stayed at a hotel in Berkeley (because, Berkeley) and walked across San Francisco Bay to preach at the convention.

After a few glasses of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Champagne, the guests could continue to the massage station where vestal virgins would rub out the cricks from the necks of pilgrims who had been holding their noses too long in the air.

“I say Jaspar,” said the distinguished man in a pink Gucci polo to Miles who was adjusting his Mulberry silk ascot. “Have you sampled the latest iPhone?”

“No, I missed that one. I walked 23 miles to the Apple Store a month in advance of the introduction and then stood in line braving three tornadoes and a blizzard. It was a ghastly experience and I was only able to survive by holding onto the faith that I would be able to lay my hand on that sacred device. Sadly, I didn’t manage to get in. I have tried the latest MacBook. It’s smashing, simply smashing.”

Jaspar took a sip of his Chardonnay that had hints of strawberry and oak.

Yeah, I’ll give ya a fuckin oak to sip on, ya hifalutin bastard.

Oh yeah, about those lines that form outside of Apple Stores when the latest communion, er, phone, is introduced. This is the kind of behavior I used to see when teens lined up to get the latest Jordans. But seriously, grown ass adults waiting to be the first on the block to get the latest phone which is allegedly already obsolete (Apple denies planned obsolescence, because any large corporation would deny such malfeasance)? Grow the fuck up.

Chris Smith moved to Colorado some time ago and took his cackle and his Macbook with him.

---

Over the years, I thought I’d mellowed. Thought that maybe the Apple crowd had dismounted from its high horse. Boy, was I ever wrong. I was recently dissuaded of that silly notion when a blogger friend of mine posted a piece in which he mentioned Dell users, of which I am one, in a derisive tone. In so many words he put forth the proposition that we Dell users are Troglodytes who still cling to landlines, and harken nostalgically back to the days of Eisenhower, and black and white televisions. Well, excuse my proletariat ass. I see the Apple snootiness hasn’t gone away. Once a douche …

---

But I sucked up my pride and signed up for Apple TV, on my Dell computer (oh the irony). I have to admit that the quality of the stream of the Giants game was outstanding. Much better than the quality of the Giants’ play that night, as they managed to kick the ball around and get shellacked by the Phillies. The quality didn’t make me any happier about the idea that sports are being streamed on various different services. Ticket prices have excluded too many fans from games and now the fan has to pay for Apple or Peacock or Paramount to watch on TV?

After the game, Cora and I watched the first episode of Masters of the Air. It was good, but not quite up to the high bar that Tom Hanks had set with Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Nonetheless, I was anxious to watch the second episode the following night.

That following night I went to the Apple TV app. Apple should have come right on but I was prompted to enter my Apple ID (email address) and password. Okay, fine. I did that and received an error message telling me that either my ID or my password was not recognized.

Okay, I said to myself. I must have entered the password incorrectly. I reentered the password.

Not recognized.

Again.

Not recognized.

Okay, I copied it down wrong. I tried other variations.

Not recognized.

Okay, I’ll reset the password.

I went to my Dell (oh the irony) computer to reset the password and a message popped up telling me that my Apple ID (email address) was not valid.

I will say this about Apple, it doesn’t, like many companies, camouflage the link to customer service so that it doesn’t have to be bothered by the people that keep it in business (aka, customers). The link was easy to find.

And so I spent my Saturday night in a chat with an Apple CSR who started by asking me what email address I’d used to set up my account. I told him, and then we spent the better part of the chat with him asking the same question in varying forms and me giving him the same answer in the original form. Maybe I was speaking in Dell, and he couldn’t understand.

Finally I sent him a screenshot of the email confirmation I’d received from Apple that showed my email address.

In the end, he told me that he couldn’t find my email address/Apple ID in the system.

With that, he punted and gave me a link that would lead me to further help. The link took me to a screen that allowed me to make an appointment for a live conversation with a real, living and breathing person. I set up the call for the next morning. I texted “Goodbye” to him, along with the comment, “Now you know why I have an Android.”

Morning arrived and I received a call from a pleasant, helpful woman named Sydney. She found my Apple ID in a matter of seconds. Apparently she’s higher up on the paygrade/security chain.

I told her, “Look, I’m not even interested in the service. Apple has my credit card number and I just want to cancel the free trial before I get billed. This isn’t worth the trouble.”

“I understand,” she said. Of course she understood. CSRs always understand – even if they don’t. “I understand,” are the two most overused and insincere words in the customer service script and when recited to a customer it usually comes out in a tone that drips with condescension.

She performed some magic that she told me would restore my ID within 24 hours. At that point I could either continue the service or call Apple and close it out (she gave me a number to call).

The next morning I tried to watch Apple and once again I received a message telling me that my ID or password were not recognized. Back to my computer where I tried to reset my password only to receive the message that my ID was not valid.

“Fuck me.”

I called Apple and the nice man told me that he understood my frustration. “Oh, if only you could,” I thought.

He told me that he could see my ID in the system but I was still about a half hour short of the 24 hours. Give it another hour, he suggested.

What else could I do? I was captive. I just wanted to get into my account so that I could cancel the one week free trial.

And so, an hour later I received the same messages telling me that I was still persona non grata. Maybe it was the ghost of the apostle Steve, pissed off at my chat note, “Now you know why I have an Android.”

Back to the phone. The nice man on the other end insisted that he understood my frustration. I choked back all of the billingsgate and “F” bombs that I wanted to launch and calmly told the man, who could not possibly in his wildest imagination, understand my frustration, that all I wanted to do was to access my account so that I could close it before my card was charged. I also asked him why I was having this problem.

The man couldn’t tell me what had landed me on the Apple shit list, so he forwarded me to someone who could close out my account and tell me exactly why I wasn’t worthy.

The next man, who also understood my frustration, closed out my account but couldn’t tell me why I was not allowed to enter the Apple inner sanctum. He also told me that since I closed out my account, which I barely used, I could not reuse my password.

---

And so here I am a week later.

I’ve no quarrel with the CSRs I dealt with; all professional and courteous. The last man who I talked to actually seemed to understand my frustration. I guess he was the guy who worked at the I really do understand your frustration desk. He couldn’t explain the reason for my exile but he suggested that I respond to the emailed survey that I would receive after our call. He assured me that, “they really do read these.”

Oh yeah, I’ll take your survey, I thought. I’ll light Apple up like a Washington DC, Fourth of July fireworks display.

In the end I just figured, fuck it. I concluded that Apple wasn’t worth wasting anymore of my time on.

When it was all over, I said to my wife, “Business must be pretty good at Apple that they can treat a new customer like shit.”

Well, that was a stupid thing to say, wasn’t it? Of course business is good. The lemmings still queue up at the Apple Store at the mere mention of a new product, and the cult of Jobs (not unlike the MAGA cult only technologically discerning) still thrives.

At our family Mother’s Day celebration I told my nephew about my experience. He’s an engineer at an aerospace company; technically savvy, and not an artless historian like his uncle. As my story unfolded, he was nodding, as if he knew where my story was going. He swears by Apple products, but he admitted that the company itself blows. He told me of his experience of being treated indifferently by the company over an issue that’s over ten years old and still unresolved. He also acknowledged that the devotees can be insufferable jerks.

Had all of this not happened I suppose that my Apple anger would’ve disappeared. In a way I’m glad that it all ended this way. The experience somehow managed to reinforce my long held feelings about Apple and I do love the irony that one of the cult members in chief, who literally used to dress like the apostle Steve, still has about 8 years to go before she’s released from the lockup.

“Hater!” you say.

You’re fuckin’ A right I am.

And wherever the apostle Steve Jobs is, I hope he’s banging away at a Commodore 64.