After Apple

Of course someone’s going to ask the big question after my previous rant: Does AppleCare Really Care? The answer is yes, they do.

Look, I left Apple on good terms for a career choice. A lot of what I wrote was put down for two reasons: because I needed to whine, seethe, and bitch after keeping that inside for four years; and because I wanted to let the folks on the other side know what their bad days and bad treatment of other human beings does to the people taking their crap all day. That’s it.

It does appear that a lot of people took it far too seriously and thought it was the whole picture. Not by far. If you’d like the whole picture, then I’ll spill what I can. Obviously, Apple is a notoriously secretive company, so I can’t share many specifics but I can give generalities and ambiguous examples. I can work with that.

The Real AppleCare

The real AppleCare exists in several large buildings around the world accessible by a variety of phone numbers. These large buildings are staffed with a mass of very friendly people. The people that spend their long days answering the calls are among the nicest I’ve ever met. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve actually watched burn out and take customers with them. The remainder of the people doing the job are understanding, compassionate, and mostly know what they’re talking about. When they don’t, Apple gives them resources (like a second tier, labs, and training) to ensure they can get their job done: to resolve your issue. And contrary to the stereotypes and accusations, no one is using a cue card or decision tree when they talk to you. They’re actually talking to you and winging it. They do know something about what they’re doing. Are they all experts? No, not at all, but they do know more than enough to do the job they’ve taken on and help you, even if they wind up not being the one to actually solve the problem.

Every group I’ve been in has been rather close. Sure, there are the normal office difficulties with someone not doing his job absolutely perfectly and that ticks someone off a little and so on, but everyone’s amiable and everyone helps when something goes south for a customer. It can get a little busy, and people can get tired of working, but by the next day they’re ready to do it again. That’s an admirable quality considering the job. It’s a very tiring job.

AppleCare is wildly dynamic and disparate in their collection of support agents. Some folks had no original skin left after the tattoos and piercings (and no hope of going through an airport in record time) and some insisted on showing up in slacks and a tie. Another wore a bathrobe. I was in a shirt, shorts, sandals, and ball cap every one of my 1,151 days at Apple. It was extremely rare to find someone that no one got along with because we all shared something core to the job: the desire to fix the problem. Above that, most of the people I knew that lasted more than a year had a Mac at home as well, and a great number of them used Macs before working at Apple. We were fans first, employees later. For many, getting that Apple badge was a sign of accomplishment, of being an Apple employee.

Which isn’t to imply some fan-boy camaraderie that didn’t exist. For some, being badged was really the Dark Side calling and they went back home to their PCs and played Everquest all night. For others, it meant they could go to the doctor for the first time in years. To each his own, there. But differences in platform at home didn’t really concern anyone since everyone knew what they supported as their job rather well.

Cube Art

Cubicles are a work-in-progress for many folks, and that’s been true in every job I’ve ever had. I used to work for a local ISP and remember the cubes in the technical support area there were rather decorated, some with things like Christmas lights or posters or whatnot. That was tame, I learned. While a number of my coworkers did that a little, some went about a hair’s-bredth close to being a fire code violation with the amount of crap in their cube. Oh, they kept the power usage down and the exit clear, but that’s about where it ended.

One fellow decided it was too loud around him and took every piece of foam eggshell packing from any part boxes he could find and made a sound-dissipating wall on every side of his cube. Standing in it, you could tell the difference. Dedication, that. Some did the seasonal themes, or the random posters bit, and still others showed their boring nature and only put up work-related quick-reference documents and pessimistic Dilbert cartoons (yeah, okay, that was me). If a desk cube is a sign of what’s in your mind, then I’m numbers, tables, and a dog trying to take over the world.

Fun

Life wasn’t all exploding iMacs¹ around the call center. While we didn’t have the Microsoftian benefits like free sodas, we did have foosball, pool, coffee, tea, hot cocoa, and fridges for your coworkers to steal your lunch from. We had the occasional beer bash get-together or talent show]. We had our contests where the “best” team got pizza or whatnot. They tried to keep it from being mundane and mostly succeeded. To all managers reading: keep that stuff going, it was all that kept me sane … -ish.

Fear

AppleCare, like a lot of Apple, is also full of fear — a fear of Apple. There are some jobs you know that if you just do the right thing you’ll hang around until the layoffs come. Apple’s not really one of those. If you tick off a customer (or they tick themselves off) and anyone convinces someone higher than your manager that it’s your fault, your future would get very iffy (your manager would stick up for you, nine times in ten). If you post anything on a web site and say that you’re an AppleCare employee and [foo] is a known issue and is being worked on … adios. If you post to the Apple Discussion boards at all … nice knowing you. If you started a blog and started, oh, blogging about life in AppleCare, have something else lined up. The latter ones, I get, but it doesn’t make it suck less. What sucks even more is that even putting your name on the same site as the word “Apple” is perceived as a risk to everyone I’d talked to. No one was willing to do it. Everyone pretty much feared telling the world anything more than: “I do support for Apple.” That’s it. The fear of having one’s words plastered on some Mac site with “but a guy at Apple promised me that my GeoPort would work on my Power Mac G5!” after saying that it might work in such-and-such conditions simply wasn’t worth it.

Now, if you were smart about it and followed the rules to the letter, you could run whole sites dedicated to the Mac under the cover of anonymity and get away with it (there’s a reason I never used my real name or mentioned working at Apple). You just had to be smart about it. The overwhelming fear Apple instilled in its employees and contractors made that a difficult proposition.

But don’t even think about writing software on the side, though. More than once Apple’s been known to randomly take ownership of someone’s program and kill it under some vague thought-law in the employment contract. This would be why I left to start doing software, it wasn’t something I could safely do on the side. It’s a common practice, but that doesn’t make it more or less evil. The only way to absolutely guarantee that what I wrote was mine was to take off. It kind of worked out in the end as I was much farther gone than I thought I was in the soul-rot department.

Insanity

You had to be a little crazy to do this job, and it surfaced now and again. There’s a small collection of mental illnesses that allow a person to take one call and be yelled at, take another and patiently explain where to change the IP address, yet another where the simplest of answers triggers a landslide of praise and love about Apple and AppleCare and stories about owning a Mac since 1984 and seeing Steve Jobs in person and how great it all is and thank you so very much I knew I needed more RAM anyway, and then take another call and struggle to explain to someone, “No, you called me for my advice, so please let me give it.” It varied so widely and it was rarely the same brand of caller twice in a row. Yet, we all came in, consumed our caffeine of choice, plowed through it until the end, and yelled “yabba dabba doo!” on the way out the door.

The insanity did manifest itself in odd ways, but most were just strange signage left throughout the building. I recall one prank where a fellow put up “Cleaning – Use Another Restroom” signs on the bathrooms in a whole building around 8am. It wasn’t until the afternoon that anyone really questioned it; everyone just went off to the other building running with their hands on their equipment across the parking lot.

Normalcy

In the end, though, while I’ll bitch, whine, and seethe about the job and the people and the life, it’s just technical support. Any customer-facing organization will be a test as to how much crap you can take being flung at you before you just shatter. I took a lot, really, but some folks have been there ten or fifteen years and still have a smile. It’s a slightly crazy smile, but it’s an honest smile. Technical support is what they do in life, and they do it well. I did it well, but it wasn’t my lot in life. I broke, I exploded, and I left a greasy mess all over the Internet for it. Mea culpa. The guys still there are small heros, aren’t burnt and broken, and are there to help. Some are in leather with red and black spiked hair and some are in clothes so business-like it makes you look twice to see them answering phones. Some leave work right on the nose and some hang around and help out their coworkers, unpaid. At the end of the day, though, they are all doing their job, and want to be doing that job, and that’s to solve problems.

Approach them as human beings and you’ll get five-star support. After all, they know you’re human, in trouble, and need help. That’s why they’re there.

Footnotes

¹ We call that a joke, where I come from. I’ve never heard of one exploding. No iMacs were harmed in the writing of this article.

² A talent show which I witnessed. In that video, I actually know two people from the intro. All I have to say about the event is … wow, that’s both unfortunate and typical Apple. Back to that bit about “fear” there.