Mac Geekery

Customers frequently leave enough of an impression that they receive nicknames, even if we never see them again. To this day, I can’t even remember why The Teacher was in my store, nor even what kind of computer she had. Occasionally we encounter people who… aren’t quite right. However, usually they’re in the store to bug us about people supposedly hacking their computers. The evidence is always something inane like, “I know it’s happening because this ‘system.log’ file is growing even though I’m not doing anything!” Not The Teacher, though. She seemed perfectly normal up until she saw a child using one of the computers in the Kids section.

The Teacher

You know, I don’t know why parents let kids under 4 use computers or even watch videos. Everyone knows video will stunt their brains, some study from Harvard says so.

Uhhhh… How to respond to something like this? Letting it pass is usually for the best. Never tell a nut that they’re a nut, I always say. But then she followed it up with a scary proposition.

I bet if I told her father about that, he’d have a deep feeling of remorse for the damage he’s done. They always do.

Confronted with the possibility of a possibly fruity customer accosting another customer about their child, I figured I ought to say something to distract her. You know… the “here’s a shiny object” ploy. At this point, I wasn’t sure if she was just mislead by a possibly skewed study, or truly nutty. So I posited that human development was still an emerging science, and while one study from Harvard may say one thing, the next study out of Yale or Stanford (or, hell, even right back out of Harvard) will say the exact opposite.

Bad move.

Look, son. Human development is an art, and don’t even try to discuss this with me. People pay me to fix their retarded kids. It only takes me 3 weeks to turn one into a perfectly normal child, too.

Battle stations! Shields to full forward, full reverse! That’s the kind of statement that makes you wonder if you’ve quite heard the customer correctly. The stunned looks of disbelief from another Genius and a handful of customers told me that I had, indeed, heard what I thought I’d heard.

Dr Jekyll

Dr Jekyll was closer to the “system.log is growing!” paranoid, with a twist. Jekyll was two people, really – I can tell that you’re shocked. Medicated, Dr Jekyll was perfectly amiable, reasonable, technically savvy, and aware of his peculiar unmedicated self. The Mr Hyde to his Jekyll was none of these.

I first met Mr Hyde. He brought in his PowerMac G5 because he was absolutely convinced he had either been hacked or had acquired a boot-sector virus. He could barely speak complete sentences, could hardly control the mouse, and I had severe doubts about his ability to key in his password. He said the hackers or viruses had made his “root file” read-only so that he couldn’t fix it. Unsure what he meant by “root file” and unable to get a better explanation from him, I poked in the Terminal and found nothing to substantiate this. It seriously perturbed him that I couldn’t see what was wrong. After calming him down, I asked him to show me this hidden partition.

Mr Hyde took over and rebooted to his Tiger install DVD. At the Language screen, he started flailing on the keyboard trying to invoke what he called “the hidden programmer interface” so he could show me the “root file” He would hold down all different combinations of modifier keys, then punch a random key or few. Next, he started mashing down dozens of keys at a time. I could see where this was going, so I intervened. I agreed to check in his computer and “ensure that it was low-level formatted to get rid of any viruses.” I even told him we’d replace the hard drive if we had to. He had reservations about this, because he’d had the same problems with his PC even though Dell had replaced the entire computer several times.

A few days later, Dr Jekyll showed up to pick up the “fixed” computer. I could hardly believe it was the same person. He even apologized for his odd behavior earlier in the week. Yet another few days later, Mr Hyde reappeared. More perturbed than ever, this time he had his wife with him. At first, I thought this would be an asset for me, as surely she knows how to keep him calm and coherent.

Wrong.

She spent most of the encounter acting just as perturbed and paranoid as he. The two fed off of each other. Furiously. Parents of children nearby were starting to usher their kids away from the Genius Bar with worried… no… fearful looks on their faces.

After I recovered the situation, I asked him to show me this “root file” again. Again, he could not. I reformatted and reinstalled his system right in front of him to show him there was no funny business going on. With the installer safely underway, I went about my business. A half-hour later, I return to them only to see that they’re gawking at the screen, furiously pointing at the computer while watching it being hacked in real time.

The problem? They’d brought up the installer log window and what they were seeing go by was – to them – incomprehensible. After looking it over and assuring them that it was all a normal part of the installer, I left them again to help another customer. By the time I got back to them, they had convinced each other that the virus was actually on the installation disk and they had stopped the installer and begun investigating again. This time, they could show me “root file.”

While booted to the CD and viewing the installer log, they tried to Save the logfile. The resulting Save Dialog is the standard widget, complete with Sidebar. The root file system is, then, the CD. And the user? Root. As you can imagine, the Home displayed in the Sidebar is, in fact, Root… on a read-only root file system.

All of this because they couldn’t understand that, when booted to a CD, the environment is largely read-only by its very nature, couldn’t calm down long enough to clearly articulate their problem, and were too paranoid to properly recall their own “troubleshooting” steps.