Manage my expectations
Well, I finally have the new iPhone and while not the work of pure divinity one might expect, it’s worlds better than anything I’m used to with my old Helio. I don’t even feel that badly that it’s costing me $20 more per month after adjustments to my account in order to get a decent amount of text messages (which were included for me before).
As for how I wound up getting it, there’s a bit of a story. I returned to the Apple Store on Wednesday after the fiasco on Monday. I’d heard they finally had new phones in stock but there was still a three hour line… I was sick of the game, though, and decided to get in line and wait it out. I was far enough back that I was in the second line: that is, the line to get in line for the main line. Pretty ridiculous, but still nowhere near as far back as if I’d been there on launch day. After about an hour’s time there, a representative comes up and tells us that they’re running very low and they might not have enough for everyone. Frustrated, I get out of the line and speak to the representative… tell them my story from Monday, about how I waited an hour and a half only to be second in line and sent away, when there weren’t ever enough phones to cover me in the first place. I wind up telling the story again to a manager, explaining that I don’t mind waiting but please give me a simple yes or no answer as to whether or not I’d be wasting my time again.
After extensive persuasion she finally told me that if each person in line were to order a black, 16-gig iPhone (the one I was interested in) there would be enough for me to get one, but that was predicated on them only ordering one, which wasn’t a given. I suggested that she might just ask the people in line what they were planning on getting and she became very defensive at the notion, insisting there were legal implications to her doing so (I was sceptical but wasn’t going to argue it to death). Finally I returned to the line, and when I reported back it occurred to the people around me that there wasn’t any reason we couldn’t informally poll the first line and find out for ourselves. This seemed like a brilliant idea to me, so armed with paper and pen I marched over to the first line and began politely asking people what they were getting.
I made it about as far as the fifth person before the manager stormed out and drew me away from the line, and began reading me the riot act for doing something that she had expressly forbade me from doing. I told her that I had never asked her if I could poll the line, only suggested that she ought to. She insisted that I had asked her, and in a very after-all-I’ve-done-for-you tone of voice told me that they had secretly set aside a phone for me after all my trouble. I thanked her but told her that her doing so secretly obviously wasn’t something I could take into account, and that I was sorry for causing such a disturbance but I genuinely hadn’t asked her permission and it hadn’t even occurred to me to do so until it had been suggested to me by others in the line with me. She began to soften up once she began to realize I was telling the truth, and I went back in line and waited another hour or so for my turn to come up. Once I got in there she made a point of apologizing for both the situation I’d experienced in the line and on Monday by offering me my choice of a free case for the iPhone, and I was able to get a sturdy leather one, so that was nice.
Apple has really dropped the ball in how they’ve managed these waits and how they’ve treated their customers. I’m sure if they didn’t have the best product out there they couldn’t afford to have such a broken process. It’s kind of sad… once I’d transferred over to the main line, they made a point of announcing to everyone in the main line that they had enough iPhones to serve them. (This wasn’t normal behaviour, and undoubtedly a precaution taken only because the manager had revealed to me the highly volatile information that they had actually set a unit aside for me.) The woman making the announcement had the wrong idea, though, and tried to get the tired and angry crowd excited by shouting “Do you guys want iPhones?” and then after the disbelieving murmurs of “yes” trickled through, had the naive notion to follow up with “I can’t hear you… did you say you want iPhones?”, to which a man near the front responded with “I want to not have been waiting in line for the past three hours”.
At the end of the day, though, the phone is certainly the best of its kind, and worth most of the insanity I had to put up with to get it.
Improv last night was interesting… we were short-staffed for Theatresports so the teams only had two people on them. I was partnered with the talented and skilled Jeremy Richards, which was great, except I think I wound up letting him carry us more than he should have had to. I don’t think there was a problem with our scenework and the audience seemed amicable enough, but it was still kind of an off-night for me and I made some weak choices. In spite of that, though, I really enjoyed the two-person teams, and how it took away the element of choice: you’re always out there performing whenever it’s your turn, so you have less time to think about what you’re doing and don’t have to worry as much about balancing the performers.
I went Friday to see friends performing in South Pacific at Snoqualmie Falls Forest Theater (where I’ve performed in Shakespeare shows as recently as a couple summers back). I was disappointed I missed the opportunity to audition and play with them, but after the long drive out there and thinking about how much time I would likely have been spending in that Quonset hut again I figured that I’m probably better off just camping with them a couple of weekends anyway.
My audition this past week was okay, but could have gone better… I had unexpected breathing issues in my song. I really hope I get called back, but I got a fortune cookie the other day that told me to “manage my expectations”. I’m used to fortune cookies not giving actual fortunes out, but it’s the first time any foodstuff has directly advised me against hoping.
Dan.
Tags: auditions, camping, improv, iphone, that's not a fortune, theatre