Business Advice

is your arsenal for developing and maintaining sound financial plans and business strategy.

Inside: Budgeting | Compensation | Valuation

Free Trial: Intuit QuickBooks

Simple Start Free Edition 2009 for Windows

Departments

Fresh Inc.

Inc.com Featured Blogs

August 7, 2008

Recruiting and Hiring

This Has Almost Nothing to Do with the iPhone

Posted by Athena Schindelheim at 4:59 PM

My MacBook keeps abruptly telling me that my startup disk is full. The last time I owned an Apple laptop, it lost patience with me and sank into an irreversible coma, taking my entire self-documented history with it. I finally made my way to the Apple store in Soho a couple of weeks ago to buy an external hard drive. But true to New York's perpetual inconvenience and my own hardware incompetence, the product refused to mount to my desktop when I got it home.

So, I returned to the store today.

I walked through the glass doors past the line of iPhone hopefuls snaking around the building, up the sleek stairway beneath the expansive skylight, and over to the modestly named Genius bar. A computer monitor greeted me and instructed me to register for an appointment. At 1:00 p.m. today, the first available slot was 11:00 p.m. on Friday. Not a naturally patient person, I approached one of the store's employees stationed at the top of the stairs in a blue shirt and a lanyard bearing his name, Pablo. Pablo listened to my predicament. Then he calmly instructed me to descend the stairs and said that the cashier would swap my defective hard drive with a new one.

I waited in line with a customer while he berated two other "specialists" in blue shirts about the aforementioned iPhone line. Another woman in a blue shirt asked me if I was paying with cash or credit. I told her that Pablo sent me, and she asked if I had brought another hard drive with me. I was clearly not holding two hard drives, but I told her no, and she said without smiling, "Well, go up there and get it." So, I went upstairs, but the hard drives were not where I remember them from two weeks ago. I went back to Pablo and explained why I was upstairs. He said he didn't know why she sent me to look for one, and said he would go downstairs to find one for me. When he returned, he escorted me back downstairs and into the check out line. But then he abandoned me.

Are you as annoyed at this point as I was? Pablo had told me that the cashier would test the new hard drive so I could avoid arriving home only to encounter the same problem, but the cashier seemed dubious when I relayed his promise to her. She left her station to confer with Pablo at the top of the stairs, and a few minutes later returned with him in tow. He connected the device to my laptop while she performed the returns process, and we all celebrated when the hard drive mounted. Even after all the shenanigans, I left the store with a smile. I didn't have to worry all the way home that the thing wouldn't work; I had found the right employee or combination of employees to solve my problem.

As you and I both know from experience, this isn't always easy. My tenuous relationship with Sprint comes to mind. Check out Joel Spolsky's take on Starbucks in this month's issue of Inc. And, please, train your staff to display some human empathy.

3 Comments

Posted by: Nan Bauroth at August 8, 2008 3:31 PM: Athena, funny blog post (well, to me, but then I wasn't the one left at the Apple altar). And to think I was finally going to go Mac this fall...
Posted by: Jim at August 14, 2008 11:37 AM: Two part reason for this note…
1) I’ve been reading through your posts and am really enjoying your insights. Thanks for taking the time to keep up the blog!
2) Would you be interested in receiving a copy of “The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work,” a newly released book by Jon Gordon? We’re interested in a review of the book or its concepts. I think you’d enjoy the premise of the book and some of the stats that Jon speaks to… such as how negativity costs companies 250-300 billion a year, according to Gallup. How various surveys say that 70-80% of people hate their jobs. And how more people die Monday morning at 9am than any other time. It’s really a book about developing positive solutions. This is not a bullet points, 10-step program book. It's a real story with characters and drama. Readers learn a ton in the process.
I work with Jon and since you are a thought leader whom I respect I’d love to get your feedback about dealing with negativity in the workplace and people's daily lives. You can check out more about the book and watch few short promo videos we’ve made by going to www.NoComplainingRule.com. There’s a part in the first one where the boss head butts an employee for complaining. It’s hilarious!
Thanks and please let me know if you’d like to check out the book.
Posted by: Bobbie Gossage at August 14, 2008 4:47 PM: You filled up your entire hard drive? What happened? Did your iTunes library get out of hand?

Post Your Own Comments

Try a RISK-FREE Issue of Inc. Today!

Renew | Contact Us | Current Issue