Geniuses Wear Blue

After several complaints from readers I have decided to restore this blog to its original bilingual format. The fact that the semester is over may also have something to do with it, not to mention the brand new keyboard, and mouse pad on my mapple. The plastic around the keyboard of my computer was chipping off like a Dutch cookie (we, unlike Amuricans, like our cookies crisp rather than soft and soggy). Apparently this happens to most Macbooks, which is why Steve Jobbs gives you a new keyboard for free, outside of the warranty.

To get my mapple fixed I went to the mapple store twice this week, and I found the answer to a major riddle: how is it that the US of A have hurled the world into a major recession, yet unemployment rises quicker in Europe than here? The answer: Steve Jobbs’ mapple stores.

 Every day of the week Jobbs employs about at the mapple store on Fifth Avenue around 100 people, and I am not counting the people who work behind the scenes, in the repair shop, cleaning the toilets, answering the phone, or the people who work the nightshift (it’s a 24-hour-store). There are about 300 tourists and customers in the store at any given time of the day, lured to go into the downstairs store by the glass Apple cube at ground level on the south corner of Central Park.

The division of labor is magnificent, and outdoes early capitalist sweatshops in its compartmentalization of tasks. At the door there are two security guards dressed in black, together with the cleaning people the only employees exempted from wearing mapple-T-shirts. In the hallway, upstairs, there are two guys who make you put your umbrella in a plastic bag when it is raining – they wear light-blue mapple-T-shirts and belong to those who are lowest in rank. There is one light-blue guy operating the glass tube-shaped elevator, a favorite amongst the tourists armed with photo- and video cameras.

When you walk down the stairs there is always someone who is sweeping them. Once you’re in the store the personnel comes in three colors: orange, light blue and bright blue. The light-blue people, from the point of view of the critical customer, are useless: all they know are the sales pitches. The orange people are slightly more useful, because they are the gateway to the blue people, who are ‘the geniuses’.

If you really need to know something, you want to speak to a genius. They are the repair people, and they live behind the counter, the ‘genius bar’. Unlike the orange and the light-blue people they do not mingle with the customers on the floor. If you want to speak with a blue person, you have to speak to an orange person to make an appointment. When a blue person opens up you are chaperoned to him/her by the orange person.

The orange people sometimes also do pre-diagnostics: they ask someone who has an appointment what their problem is, so that they can maybe solve it, and relieve the blue people. This is never the case though. The backstage people wear black, I saw one of them bring in my computer from the repair shop, but there must be plenty more of them.

What has all of this to do with the recession? At any given time about twenty-five percent of the personnel at the mapple store are new recruits: they usually wear orange, or light-blue, and they are being instructed by other employees. One woman, wearing well-cut formal pants under her orange mapple-T-shirt and designer glasses looked like she had just relocated from one of the big banks that went under. One bustling orange guy sounded like he had been selling plasma TVs at Circuit City up until recently, and there were a number of pale and shy recent graduates, who probably thought they would have ended up somewhere else after spending over 1k on their education.

The upside of all this: my computer was fixed within one day. Thank you, mapple people.

PS: For those of you who don’t watch the Simpsons, watch this clip and find out how Apple became mapple.

PPS: Complainers can read up on some older bilingual posts from August through November.