iZoo: Visit to the Lenox Mall Apple Store

We hauled our defective eMac off to the Apple store at Lenox Mall in scenic Buckhead. You've got to hand it to Steve Jobs. He's got a slough of people absolutely ga-ga over those goddamn iPods. There must have been 300 people in there fighting over the little devices that scream of their wearer-addicts "Excuse me if I ignore you because I'm in la-la land!" He's got these temples built to his products. Inside are bemohawked priests and pierced acolytes in jeans and black long-sleeve t-shirts, which he faithful instantly, reverently recognize as the ceremonial garb of St Steve. We had to make an online appointment for an audience with high priests, or Apple Genius in the Apple cant, at the Genius Bar. The Genii were in great demand, so we had some time to kill.

If you've never visited an Temple of Apple, I'll describe the layout. I'm sure that, despite differences in scale, they're likely all the same. Apple is nothing if not relentlessly homogeneous. The temple has six transepts devoted to different products, but are organized by quirky categories: music, photo, video, kids, home, and professional. There are three altars. The great altar, a giant projection screen, is centered in front of the nave, with a pulpit on the left. Pretty traditional, eh? The Genius Bar Altar is tucked away on the right. The most important of all is the one where they collect your money on the way out.

When one of the priests is not performing a ritual at the main altar, there is some Apple indoctrination propaganda material playing on the screen. One of the better ones was a pretentious bald guy dressed in -- wait for it -- the black long-sleeved t-shirt vestments of St Steve going on about the continuity of design elements between the iPod and iMac. He was trying to answer "what does this product say about it's consumer?" for the faithful without having them think too much about it. Wandering about the Temple with this in mind was enlightening.

The faithful can be segregated into two groups: iSheep and iWankers. iSheep are dumb, dumb, dumb. Example: people are dukin' it out in the music transept to try on an iPod. There is no one in the home transept, except a lonely acolyte watching over three iMacs and their matching iPod. Yup. If you're in the music transept, you're likely iSheep.

iWankers are not dumb, but they're more irritating. You can kick a iSheep, and it will get out of the way and leave you alone. iWankers come up to you and evangelize. I was trying to figure out how to do input of multibyte UCS codepoints in emacs. I had kicked off a terminal and reading the info browser in emacs. So, some iWanker comes over and tells me how Apple and OS X has rendered Unix "quaint". Quaint? Who the fuck are you, iWanker? Goddamn Alberto Gonzalez? I knew better than try to engage him, so I played the iSheep with "That Unix stuff is way over my head. I'm just closing this thing down so I can start Photoshop Elements SE Version 3!" There are only a few defenses against iWankers. A Sig Sauer P210 is a good one, but, alas, not an option in the Temple. Playing the iSheep is another, so I went with that one.

I've gotta run, but there's more to come.