Let's Hear It For Apple (Where in the World Is Alan: IV)

November 11, 2011

Let’s Hear It For Apple (Where in the World Is Alan: IV)

I’m getting a lot of writing done on this trip, on airplanes and on days between speeches. But this morning, having forgotten my experience in Italy just weeks ago, I plugged my Nikon into my laptop port to load photos, and the computer went black and would not come back on. The hotel IT manager actually called Apple for me, but they couldn’t help remotely.

There is a huge Apple store with a Genius Bar ten minutes from the Shangri-La, but the earliest appointment is next Tuesday. I fly to Melbourne tomorrow morning to speak on Sunday, and my slides are on the lap top, in addition to all the writing I wanted to do. (I know, I could have used dropbox to retrieve them, and even thought of purchasing a keyboard for my iPad to write on the way home.)

I trekked to the Apple store where the first employee at the door, Andrew, told me it was very difficult to get to the Genius guys since it was 3:40 and they only take appoints until 4:00, and were obviously at capacity. When I told him my issue, he took me up two flights of stairs, chatted with two other guys (you can’t tell who’s a manager here, everyone looks the same, and they’re all having great fun), and they assured me they’d get me to someone.

At 4:40, I was introduced to Nick, who took my computer in the back, told me he suspected it was the battery, and then, after hitting a keyboard furiously, found that there were no batteries to be had, and that one could be shipped for next week. However, the computer would now work on direct power with the battery out. That would work for my speech and on the airplanes with power strips.

Not satisfied, Nick hit some strange combinations of buttons, and got the machine working on battery power! He theorized that it had turned off to protect itself from a power surge, and he knew had to coax it back to life.

Here’s to the Apple store and Genius Bar in Sydney, here’s to a great company, and am I glad I bought this stock at $17 many years ago, before all the splits!