The honeymoon’s over

In my closing keynote at the Brandon Hall event, I raved about how Apple had its act together. I’d purchased a MacBook Pro four days earlier. Mac users are a community of practice. They identify with one another, help newbies get on board, and share how-to information. The Apple service that impressed me the most was One-to-One, a tutoring program in which you could receive as much as an hour of personal advice per week for a year at a cost of $99.

My first session was terribly worthwhile. I learned dozens of things. My second session, yesterday, was just plain terrible. My tutor tried to be helpful but he couldn’t answer my questions. “What’s the ker-plunk noise I keep hearing, despite having turned the sound off?” He didn’t know. Perhaps I was running too many apps at once. “How do I pull these movie files into iMovie?” He didn’t know, nor did the expert he pulled away from the Genius Bar. Periodically, my guy would whirl around, cough into his hands, mutter an apology, and continue tapping my screen and keyboard. (I’ve been washing my hands religiously ever since.)