[Apple Store - North NJ]

Woman 1: (Late 60s) I'm looking for a J-Phone. My grandson wants me...
Guy Clerk: (Early 20s, black clothes, designer glasses.) (Sneers.) We don't carry J-phones.
Woman 1: This is the Apple store? Yes, J-phones.
Guy Clerk: Sorry. No Js. Any other letters?
Woman 1: (Confused) Uh...
Other Woman: (Good samaritan) She means "I". What's wrong with you?
Guy Clerk: Oh. "I." Of course. iPhones. We carry them.
Woman 1: (Places her outdated phone on counter next to iPhone) Isn't a phone a phone? What's the difference between these?
Guy Clerk: You mean other than yours was made before the Industrial Revolution, before dinosaurs roamed the earth...and no one living in this century would be caught...
Woman 1: You're not happy are you? You think you're better than being a sales person at the mall.
Guy Clerk: (surprised, pauses.) No. Yes. I guess...
Woman 1: You're not. You're a sales clerk and you're rude and small. I'd like to speak with your supervisor.
Guy Clerk: (contrite) Look, I'm...
Woman 1: Now. (Sales guy still hesitates.) Not tomorrow. Now.

B-Take
[Back & Front Story]

We watched this interaction unfold kind of like a slow motion car wreck. You see the soon-to-collide elements, you know what’s going to happen (or you think you do), you’d like to try to stop it but you can’t; so you just pause and watch. (And in our case, try to scribble down as quickly and unobtrusively as possible the dialogue. There were 2 of us, so we think we got it; but – full disclosure -- a few of the words had to be re-interpreted from our barely legible notes.)

The dynamics were there. Angry miserable sales guy, a meltdown waiting to happen. (Minutes earlier he had told a customer basically to shut the f**k up when she insisted her iPod wasn’t working. In fact, it wasn’t.) And hapless customer – an older woman, apparently weak, confused, the perfect target.

Only this woman wasn’t what she appeared to be. When she turned on the guy – suddenly, telling him off – it was like he heard a gun shot detonate. His head snapped back, then to the side, his eyes literally bugged out for a second or two like they do in cartoons. That’s how unexpected the woman’s transformation was – from clueless pathetic grandma to don’t-give-me-s**t-you-a-hole tough senior babe.

The manager did quickly come out, as the woman requested. He was in the same black outfit as the sales guy. The “hip” uniform. Just like Steve Jobs. (Don’t they know all black is not hip anymore; it’s stupid, cliché, tacky, posing?) He apologized profusely. He then took the sales guy to the side and (not quietly) spoke to him. (We could hear sporadic words. Crazy, get help, apologize, sick, apologize or…) The woman continued standing by the counter talking to some other customers who were now laughing and congratulating her for her “heroism,” the new shopping mall senior-babe super hero.

Then the sales guy came back. He looked like he’d gotten some very bad news. Or maybe he’d already gotten very bad news and it was finally hitting him. His body looked slack, he appeared exhausted. He apologized, saying (incongruously, inappropriately) to the effect, he just split up with his wife, he hasn’t seen his kids in a week (he looks 20 years old, how could he have kids! – our thought), he hasn’t slept, he’s had unexplained digestive problems (no joke, he said this), etc., etc. Then he handed the woman a gift certificate of some kind. She looked at her new customer friends, who were nodding, then at the guy. She said (really): “Sounds like a tragedy, hon. If I wanted tragedy I’d have lunch with my ex-husband.”

The sales guy nodded. He then smiled a little; then a little more, almost a laugh. He handed the woman her iPhone package. She looked at him a second or two, reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Then she left. The manager was walking across an aisle and started approaching the sales guy. The sales guy waved at him; then he gave the manager the finger, then walked out the store.

We were now in soap opera territory. Not a car wreck -- a melodrama, the middle of a story arc. Some of the customers laughed. The Manager shook his head and walked past us and he laughed.

Us? We ran out after the guy. We caught him near an ornate marble fountain. We asked him whether all his personal problems were true. He told us (after a lot of hesitating and our talking about other stuff): Yea, the problems were true, all except the kids (there he got carried away, he said); he had no kids. (We knew it!) He said he was working at the store while going to grad school. And, yes, he hated the job, it was a bore -- he hated the attitude, like selling Apple stuff was an honor; but really it was no different than selling shoes, except selling shoes paid more. He knew he was taking out his frustration on customers; he felt bad about it, but he assumed he would be fired weeks ago and that would be it. What does it take to be fired, he asked. Apple's supposed to be about customer service, yet they seemed to like he was acting like an a-hole, he said. That pissed him off even more. The hypocrisy. They wanted him to act cool, kind of above it all, it was part of the image. But not crossing the line (whevever it was that week), to the point of terrorizing the customers.

He sat on the edge of the fountain and stared at the pennies at the bottom. There were 1000s of them. (We thought, who comes to the mall with pennies?)

He asked us who we were. We told him, nobody, we had a website, part of a small media company, etc. He wouldn’t tell us where he went to grad school or what he was studying. But he said that lady, just now, got to him. What he wanted right now more than anything, he said, was a big hot fudge ice cream sundae, with marshmellow. Sounded good to us.

We headed back to the Apple store – because, in fact, we were there to buy something. There was a new person – a woman, also in black – behind the counter where “our” sales guy had been. She seemed enthusiastic and was talking happily to a customer. No meltdown for her, at least for now. But maybe she was new, maybe in a few weeks; we had time, we’d be back. There was always something in the store we wanted, even if we couldn’t afford it.
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