Mac Store on Knox: Fuck You Smokers!

Today my wife and I went to the Mac Store on Knox, in an area known as Knox Park. Knox Park is a bourgeois as the day is long. It was the first part of DFW that I was shown by some locals as a real taste of the town. It was so disappointing to me that I became a shut-in for nearly a year.

Its not that its not nice. Its beautiful. There is a cute little hot-dog place there where they have a wooden carved hot-dog man outside thats very nice. The Mexican restaurant Chuy's is awesome, and has vegetarian Mexican food.

They have Starbucks, and Crate and Barrel, and fancy restaurants that my Dad likes to go to with his prestigious scientist friends from UT Southwestern when he's in town. Its very nice, very fancy, and very bourgeois. So what you mostly have in there, like other Dallas uptown parts, is the DFW nouveau riche enthralled with themselves, SMU frat boys getting their margaritas at the On the Border corporate mexican restaurant, and Dallasites hoping to soak up some of the nouveau riche e vibes for their own perverse reasons. The latter is definitely the category I fit in.

But they do have a Mac store, and this includes a Genius Bar. The Genius bar is part of the Mac store which services computers. They have notoriously good costumer service, which was immortalized for me in an erotica story in Violet Blue's pro-sex podcast.

My wife and I have very few instances of brand loyalty. We are cheapskates. In spite of all our anti-establishment beliefs and rock and roll rebellion we watch financial advice shows, clip coupons, look for sales, etc. But we love our Mac computers. I use my Mac for so many recreational creative projects that I would feel injured without it.

Her computer stopped booting up the operating system several months ago. We don't know why, but it would just taunt us with a blue screen and nothing else. I knew I needed to do something, and I sure as hell didn't want to spend $1000 on a new computer.

My wife is a French femme fatale and when her computer quit working my Mac became communal property. I would have refused her at my own peril. My wife and I are also both occasionally unkempt. My mac is held together in some places by scotch tape and is grotesquely stained by food, cigarettes, and two keys have literally been burned. It doesn't help that the old mac books are a white which shows stains in such a prominent way.

This set up a cycle of resentment where I was taking a backseat to my wife's constant use of the one working Mac: mine! She put John Bonham from Led Zeppelin as the wallpaper picture. I retaliated by replacing the dead drummer with Stalin.

My wife's computer sat unused for months, and her treatment of her computer was a lot like mine. Constant use in the presence of an unorthodox life style.

I mean my mac is not some sterile device to be kept in a lab. I have taken it all over the U.S. and to South America. I write on it. I do art on it. Its more like Kerouac's type writer than some sterile protestant business machine. My mac has a nickname, I call it excalibur, and thats not done lightly. I see my mac as my weapon I use to take on the world. About a month ago my Mac stopped recharging.

To make matters worse our kitten who we call Dumb-Dumb, went through a pissing phase where he regularly coated our computer bag. This is the computer bag we took to the Mac store.

So we show up at the Mac Store, which looks like a utopia in a Star Trek future where everyone looks like they sing in a band and program computers. We are kindly attended to, as we have appointments. Even though we look as out of place as beggars from Calcutta in the Ritz.

We go look around and yearn for the Mac products that tease us beyond our price range.

Then we are met by Bryan. Bryan is the computer repair guy, his title according to the Apple corporation lead by Steve Jobs is "Genius."

I pull my computer out of my piss-bag. In an act of great slacker heroism I tried to coat the piss-coated computer bag in a new layer of upholstery cleaning spray. The combination was not an improvement.

I open up my computer. Disgusting. It was as if I was revealing my underwear had a giant skidmark on it in front of everyone.

Bryan was so kind as to wash my computer for me. It looked a hundred times better, and took him about 15 minutes.

He runs a diagnostic, tells me I need a new battery. Price : $120, I bitch about the price he brings it down to $100. I still say I can't afford it.

Then my wife's computer is opened. He has already cleaned mine, it took him 15 minutes. Her's is worse.

He asks if these are nicotine stains, if we smoke. My wife smokes over two cartons a month. She smokes like a french fatale, while pounding hours away at the keyboard in her own weird internet life.

If my computer was white underwear with a skidmark, her's had a turd crowned by dingle-berries.

I imagine Bryan was irritated because he had already cleaned my disgusting computer. He was not going to take any shit from us, we were clearly not Knox Park material, neither of us had our skinny jeans on after all.

We confessed to smoking, like two children revealing their dirty underwear and being asked if we even wipe.

Though for future reference if you smoke and you are at the mac store, the correct answer is "no you do not smoke, you are an anti-smoking activist, and you are offended that he would even suggest that. This must be some dirt from the Dallas pollution problem. "

Because according to Bryan Mac has a company policy against servicing computers that have been "contaminated" by tobacco products. My wife's computer was now banned from any hardware repairs by the Steve Jobs nanny state.

I was livid. He said that this much nicotine on the computer was as hazardous to his health as if it had "pee and poo on it."

Of course I was taking big wiffs of my cat pissed soaked computer bag while being told this.

My computer was also nicotine stained, and probably stained with other byproducts. My wife had been using my mac for months with a cigarette in hand. Two keys were actually burned, with melted plastic and everything. But he cleaned that one. I think Bryan was (perhaps rightfully so) enforcing this rule mostly because he was pissed off about having to deal with two nasty dead beats, clearly out of place on the starbase I mean the Mac Store.

I started bitching about how this was $2000 worth of computers. I started listing off mac products I bought. I talked about how this amounted to de facto discrimination by mac of all the computer users who smoke, because I don't know any cigarette smokers who would abstain from smoking while farting around on the computer.

He said if he didn't have to fix any hardware he could still fix it, but that her computer was still banned because it was "contaminated" and this hazardous waste was banned as "company policy."

Bryan did fix the computer, for free. We were definitely not in a presentable state, and our computers were very filthy. So if the reader wants to walk away from this thinking that we are just a couple of nasty-asses who got better than we deserved, fair enough.

I bought the battery because I felt like an asshole for our computers being so nasty. I hope he got a commission for it. He did fix my wife's computer for free.

But I suspect if the reader has a cigarette in hand, this post might affect their opinion of Mac.