Certified

I had an appointment this morning with an Englishman that travels a lot. His wife and kids live somewhere in London. He signed up at the Genius Bar for help with video chats on his MacBook Pro.

When I called out his name, he walked up with grief. I could tell his heart was heavy. He hasn't been able to get the iChat to work for months. He had bought his wife a MacBook so they could do video chats from London to where ever he was in the world. He wanted to both see and hear his family in real time while he traveled. He said he's only been able to get the video chats to work at certian hotels at random times during the day, but the connection was always poor.

Well, we set up the video chat between his MacBook Pro and the Genius Bar's MacBook Pro. Yay, success. This means the hardware is OK and the software is OK. Whats the problem then? Ah, the network.

The Englishman seemed dishevled when I told him about packets, bandwidth, the internet structures, the network interfaces and the overall complexity of network systems. I tried my best to explain to him that there wasn't really anything we could be doing to improve his network connection. The problem wasn't a quick fix. Fixing the network would be like trying to fix US Health care, an example I didn't want to use. I didn't want him to freak out, yet the irony is somewhat alarming. The best advice I could give him was to try different locations, such as the library, coffeeshops, even different hotels, to see if he'll have success on another network. The library was only a few blocks from the store, and why not give that shot while he was in the area.

He walked back into the store later that afternoon. He was glowing and stood very tall. "Rose, I just came back from the library. It works!"
"Did you just finish iChatting with your wife?"
"And my kids too!"
"YAY!"
"Rose, thank you. Really, I just want to thank you. We actually had a whole conversation and we didn't get disconnected."

The Englishman was SO elated. It was so obvious in his face, the way he stood, he was happy. His whole aura smiled.

I'm so glad I passed my test. If all that was meant for to see this guy be so happy, then WOW, it was totally worth it. Makes me sort of love my job. I've already loved technology, even though I'd been cursing network configurations for several months now.

There's something about that man's happiness that made me proud to be a certified Mac Genius today.