I suspect they are building snowmen in Hell at the moment because I had a really bad Apple Store experience.

You see, I decided to get an iPhone.

I’m not a gadget kind of guy. I have a cell phone that gives me 1000 minutes of talk time every year for $100. I ended last year with 993 minutes left. But I’ve always had this fantasy of going to a yard sale, seeing something interesting and then being able to whip out my phone right there and check eBay for the value. I imagine myself finding extra copies of the US Constitution and previously undiscovered art by Leonard da Vinci with my internet-enable phone. So I went to the Apple Store to make my fortune.

During my first visit to the Apple Store in the middle of workday I was unable to buy an iPhone. I only had a lunch hour to spend and I ended up waiting 45 minutes just to talk to someone who could help me. There was no line, there was just no hurry on anyone’s part. I signed up with two different teeny-bopper “concierges” and eventually was helped by a young overly laid-back guy wearing a large cross around his neck named Dave.

I told Dave I wanted an iPhone but had some questions. He nodded silently. I asked about the cell phone plan, about coverage, about termination fees and other cell phone sort of questions. He couldn’t answer a single one. He kept saying, “Oh, that’s AT&T, not us.” Undaunted I went ahead and agreed to buy an iPhone anyway. He pulled out a little handheld computer that clearly wasn’t made by Apple and started tapping away, asking questions, running my credit card, and generally doing his retail thing. All was going well until he told me the phone number of the new iPhone.

“What? That area code is like 30 miles away from here. I want something local.”

“Oh, sorry, I can’t do anything about it. That’s AT&T.”

“Can the guys at the AT&T store help me? I don’t want to be charged for changing a number I just bought from you.”

Dave didn’t know. My hour was long gone. I told Dave to forget the iPhone, cancel my order and that I was going to go ask my questions at the AT&T store in the mall. When all was said and done I had wasted two hours of my lunch break (it’s good to be a manager) and walked away with no iPhone.

But I still wanted the damn thing. Several days later I went back to the same mall and straight to the AT&T store. I asked my questions and got my answers. Then I went to the Apple store and…waited again.

For a retail store that has a “Genius bar” a “concierge” service and witty ads featuring how cool and easy to use Apple products are it’s pretty stunning at how poorly they’ve learned to manage customers. During my wait time I wandered around the store and started to pay attention to what was going on around me. At the Genius Bar I watched a “genius” insult a customer’s intelligence and talk down to another customer. While walking around I saw several people come into the store, wander around for ten minutes, ask aloud how to get help and then left when they couldn’t figure it out. I watched the Concierge girls spend a lot of time chatting about high school and complaining about their parents.

The more I watched the Apple Store employees the more I realized that being overly enthusiastic about a product does not always make you the best salesperson. A few of the salespeople made snide remarks about Windows and Windows users… to customers who obviously had Windows PCs. Apple needs to realize that Apple enthusiasts do not always make for the best Apple salespeople.

I was the fifth person to walk into the store after it opened and I still ended up waiting a good 30 minutes before I was actually able to talk to someone who could help me. Again, I went through the whole answer and question process and again they gave me a phone number that was several counties away. I immediately took the phone to the AT&T store where they were able to change the number without a charge after a three minute wait.

And so I was done. Or so I thought.

Earlier this week I got not one but TWO AT&T bills. I opened each up and looked them over. One bill had the phone number of my new iPhone. One bill had… a phone number I had never heard of. I called AT&T and they confirmed that it was opened at an A&T store… on my first visit.

It turns out that Dave the laid back christian Apple Store employee had not canceled my order. Instead he had rung it through, giving me a phone number but no phone. AT&T tried to cancel the number but she said they couldn’t because “Apple stores lock their numbers and don’t allow anyone but them to close an account they opened.”

So someone from AT&T had to speak with the manager of the Apple Store and the manager had to close the extra AT&T phone number. Several hours later AT&T called me back and told me they had done this and the matter was resolved.

Apple isn’t a bad company, the Apple Stores aren’t a bad idea and Dave is probably not a bad person. But Apples Stores are just like any other retail establishment: they’re mall stores staffed by teenagers and retail store workers who really don’t care about anything other than the girl in the tight sweater who works at The Gap or the cute guy who makes pizza at the Sbarro.

I’m rather impressed with the iPhone but I won’t be going back to the Apple Store anytime soon.

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When I was growing up I didn’t want to be a fireman, policeman or some shmuck that worked in an office. I wanted to be a humor columnist.

Specifically, I wanted to be Dave Barry, or at least Dave Barry with the weekly Parade magazine column and without the awful haircut. I loved the idea of being given truckloads of cash to write a simple 1,000 word column every week. I bought all his books, read all his weekly columns and, when I got older, scoured microfilm and Gopher (ha! remember Gopher?!?) for news articles and interviews with him. His life was perfect: he seemed to spend 38 hours a week goofing off and then spent two hours every week writing about it.

Ahh, humor.

Notice that I didn’t say “comedian.” I thought about being a comedian for a while back when stand-up comedians were all the rage (ha! remember the late Eighties?) but quickly decided that while it looks like a lot of fun the hours had to be hellish and I was more of a morning person anyway.

By high school I was pretty set on writing humor for a newspaper (or nationwide magazine, I wasn’t picky) for a living. I wrote stuff and submitted it to magazines and newspapers and, more often than not, received nothing back. As a sophomore I took a journalism class in which we were given the assignment to write a “Letter to the Editor.” Letters to the Editors are unintentionally hilarious typo-filled diatribes written by “normal people” who somehow slipped past the guards and managed to find a typewriter locked away in the institution’s basement. Our letter was supposed to be an argument for some sort of change.

The topic was left up to us and as a dorky white male student of a preppy private high school I didn’t really have too much to complain about, though at the time I probably felt that the Universe itself was conspiring against me for not showering me with fame, money, cute girls and good looks. Come to think of it, I’m still pretty pissed with the Universe about that.

Anyway, a few days earlier our school cafeteria had started charging a nickel for ketchup packets because prior to that students were grabbing handfuls of ketchup packets and then doing what kids do: slipping them into books, stomping on them in hallways, eating them as though they were vegetables, etc. I put off my journalism assignment until the last moment and then, probably because I wanted to watch The A-Team or some other top-quality TV show, I sat down at my electric typewriter (ha! remember electric typewriters?) and quickly banged out my own typo-filled rant about underground ketchup smugglers who were now infiltrating our cafeteria and selling packets for as low as two cents a piece. I don’t think I’m being too proud or boastful when I give you my honest opinion of my first humor column: It was awful.

But, more importantly, it was done before they had a chance slip a mickey into Mr. T’s milk and get him on an airplane.

I turned the assignment in and the next day and my journalism teacher said she laughed out loud, loved it and wanted to publish it in the high school newspaper. Looking back on it I realize this was a pivotal moment. At the time I just shrugged and said, “Umm, okay.”

It was a hit among the other three students who read the high school newspaper and even a few of the teachers commented on liking my little ketchup piece. I now had a taste of fame (“You’re that guy…”) and I loved it. I still didn’t have money, cute girls or good looks, but I went from being nobody to nobody who had been published in the high school paper.

So I wrote another column for the next issue. I wrote about ketchup again because, hey, you have to write what you know. People liked it. It was awful, too.

And I kept doing that for the rest of my high school years, though I eventually left the tomato paste themes and moved into other important topics like books, holidays, pants and tests. With topics like those you can imagine the high school girls were just clamoring all over me.

When I graduated I knew I wanted to continue writing so I spent the summer writing columns in hope of getting them published…somewhere. I went to college in the fall and stopped into the student newspaper office one September morning with a stack of columns. I gave them to the features editor who spent about 30 seconds looking them over and said, “Okay.”

The next week I was a regular columnist for the college newspaper. They spelled my name wrong. My columns had typos. My writing was getting better, but it was still awful.

For the next four years I wrote a weekly humor column. I also attended some classes. They gave me a piece of paper with some funny script on it and once again I didn’t have any place to publish my writing.

So I did what any normal, rational college-educated person would do: I blew all my graduation money and savings on a start-up “zine” back when people knew what “zines” were. I’m not going to ask you if you remember Zines. No one does. I rented an apartment with no furniture, bought a computer, and drank a lot of beer with a lot of friends, didn’t publish a very good zine, drank more beer and pretty much ended most of my friendships with the zine people.

At this point my aspirations of becoming a humor columnist were diminishing for one real reason: I needed money.

To solve this problem I started doing this thing called “work.” I did that for about ten years and it didn’t really agree. So I got into something called “management” and learned that “going to Work” is different from “going to work.” For most people work is an action to be done. For managers work is just a place to go to surf the web, go to meetings and send out important sounding but meaningless emails for fun all day. All my writing taught me to be a fast typist, so I’m often able to send out dozens of meaningless emails before lunch, leaving me plenty of free time during the afternoon.

Today there really aren’t any mainstream humor columnists. There aren’t people who are quite on the scale of Dave Barry, Art Buchwald, Andy Rooney and all the others. Most professional humor writers are more specialized now. There are lots of reasons why the humor columnist died, but it’s got a lot to do with the drop of newspaper readers, decreased attention spans, the rise of multimedia the birth of the internet and the classification of ketchup as a vegetable in public schools. Now we have entire multimedia empires (The Onion, The Daily Show, Fox News) dedicated to humor and satire. Humor writers toil behind the scenes while humor personalities on TV and video deliver jokes in a mockingly serious manner.

I only use calligraphy to write my blog posts.

Today really funny people end up on video or, if they’re really desperate, publish their own stuff online. I am still missing the aforementioned good looks, so I decided to start a blog.

This blog. Well, this is one of the blogs I’ve started. I hate the term “blog” in this case. I do not consider myself a “blogger” because that doesn’t mean anything. I consider myself a “writer who uses humor” though that doesn’t really have much more meaning these days because just about everyone who writes anything uses humor.

A blog can be like a humor column and sometimes, when I squint a lot and hold my hands out a certain way, it looks like my stuff is published with real newsprint in a real newspaper. This analogy ends there, though, because I’ve learned that no matter how hard you try you really can’t wrap fish in a 21-inch LCD monitor.

Being a humor columnist, especially one like Dave Barry, is probably impossible these days. My dream of becoming a humor columnist has pretty much gone the way of the ice delivery man (ha! remember the ice delivery man? No, neither do I) and the phonograph repair shop. Even my humor columnist hero, Dave Barry, has since retired and now writes humor on his personal blog.

Writing a humor blog is much more liberating than writing a humor column because you don’t have to worry about deadlines or editors or column inches or even readers. If I had a real humor column I could never have written about how you can wash your keyboard in your dishwasher or how we should be congratulating Chinese toy makers. As a humor columnist I would have had to follow boundaries, rules and standards. With a blog I can just write, push a button and I’m published all over the world. There’s no pressure to perform, though the rewards are accordingly low. For example, many people are probably looking for games to play with a newborn baby, most probably aren’t too interested in buying products from me once they read my advice.

I don’t have the fame, the money, the good looks or the cute girls, but I do have some writing that I’m proud of, I have some readers who have enjoyed some of the silly things I’ve written and I still have fun sitting down and typing out whatever I want. It can ramble all over the place, it still can have typoos, it can still be awful, but no one really cares.

See?

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