Oh, Apple.
Thank the fucking Lord I only have FOUR shifts left.
Jesus Christ.
Nothing in my entire life has ever induced the same level of anxiety as being a part-time Specialist at Apple.
Working at Apple makes you realise there are two different types of people in this world: you're either an Apple person or you're not an Apple person. And it has nothing to do with whether you have an iPhone or an android. Very occasionally, someone (like me) manages to bypass four interviews and trick everyone into thinking they are an Apple person. You know how most workplaces have a mix of different personality types? Not at Apple. The top performing employees are basically like clones of each other.
Apple people are:
-Articulate in speech
-Smiley
-Loud
-Energetic
-Enthusiastic
-Obsessed with their job
-Rule followers
-Polite
-Confident
-Extroverted
-Fake empathetic
-Fake concerned
-'Friendly'
-In general, fake af
Naturally, I'm none of those things.
It's like as soon as I step foot into that store I freak out and get major anxiety. I'm fine with talking to coworkers outside of the Apple store. I just can't socialise with any of my coworkers on the sales floor. I clam up and just act the opposite of normal. I get jumpy and paranoid and super self-conscious. At first I was like, oh it's fine. It's only been two weeks, I'm just settling into the job. AFTER FOUR MONTHS, THOUGH? After 20 people have already been hired after you and you're no longer the newbie who's just finished the Apple 'Core' training program? You start to think you're a bit abnormal. You go, wait a minute. I'm never going to be settled in, I'm never going to feel less anxious because THIS IS NOT FOR ME. And it's not just because I'm working two jobs 7 days a week. I don't feel like this at Greyhound. Working at Apple makes working at Greyhound feel like paradise. The 3 boys I work with at Greyhound and me, we're pretty affectionate towards each other. I walk into the Greyhound office at the start of my shift and I might punch Chris on the shoulder, be like 'what's up Cary Canary' or tell Dom about running into Peter Cook, one of the quirky Goulburn bus regulars on the way to work. I rock up to Apple, and I can barely say hi to any of my coworkers let alone socialise with them and I feel myself sweating and feeling super exposed and my voice drops by like a hundred decibels and every second polishing iphones feels like an eternity. I literally get anxious to the point where from an outsider's perspective I act like I'm high or something.
I've never perfected the art of faking knowledge about tech specs. It doesn't help that everyone in store treats working at Apple as a privilege, not a job. Like we're fucking doing a service to the world or something.
So many random moments that have just made me shake my head in WTF mode:
-Some of those customers. Rich bogans. Enough said. Just a random one off the top of my head: a woman goes, 'I want to get my phone screen fixed'. Me: 'Did you want to book in a reservation for today'? Woman (coldly): 'Well considering I just drove an hour from Goulburn, yeah.' And I've had many, many customers like that.
-The 'fearless feedback' system. Where your fellow coworkers are encouraged to give you 'feedback'. Does not work. Period. That super blurred line between leader/trainer/coworker/friend. I can't be friends or go out for a drink with the same 22 year old girl who trained me and lectured me on 'visual standards' (aka rearranging the colour order of my whiteboard markers before leaving for break). It just doesn't work like that. The problem is when Apple encourages your fellow coworkers who are also earning the same wage as you to not only train you but lead you and give you 'feedback'. It gets fucking awkward. It's not in my nature to view authority figures as candidates for forging friendships with. To me that's a no no. It's like being best friends with your school principal or something. We can be civil, and nice to each other, but we keep our distance. We ain't getting drunk together anytime soon. In fact I shouldn't even be seeing you at all outside of work uniform.
-The fact that a LOT of people in store have no idea wtf they are talking about. Let's face it, some of us employees are 18/19 year old uni students. It's when you ask 3 people who have worked here since 2012 how to turn on a bluetooth keyboard and they have no idea (answer: the ipad needs to be ON the keyboard), that you really start questioning whether Apple is better off hiring people who actually know what they're doing.
-Endless amount of shit you can get trained on. To the point where you feel like it's never ending, and you will never be able to do your job to the best of your ability because EVERYDAY there is something new that you and 5 other people you ask don't know how to fix or do.
-The pressure to constantly be enthusiastic and smiley and articulate.
-The fact that from an external viewpoint (in terms of store politics), there is no pressure whatsoever. The managers all try to be your besties and God forbid you ever bitch about a coworker, manager (or even a customer for that matter) to another employee. In the Apple staff breakroom this simply doesn't happen. Unless a customer very obviously complains about you (and yes, I have had that happen by the biggest fucking bitch in the history of my list of shitty customers), a manager will never ever comment on your interaction with a customer or how you could have improved (which isn't to say a fellow coworker won't). What's weird is this is perfectly normal at Apple. But you still feel the underlying sense of pressure. It's strange and hard to explain. It's like the company tries to hard to give off a 'do your own thing, we don't give a shit or discipline our employees' vibe, but beneath the surface, you know the pressure's there to perform and socialise and be super extroverted and polite to everyone.
-There being nothing to do in store when there's no customers around. You legitimately stand around awkwardly doing nothing. Which is fine when you work in a clothing store and can casually stroll around or hide behind a row of jackets. It's not fine when you're just standing there with your hands behind your back behind a table of ipads and 20 of your fellow coworkers are all occupied which makes it glaringly obvious that you're the only one who hasn't managed to snare a customer.
-The entire store is so exposed you feel like you're on a stage. All the tables are low and you can see/hear what everyone is doing, every minute of the day.
-The moment when there are so many new people who get hired in such a short space of time, that when you look around you realise that like out of 20 specialists only 2 actually know how to do a phone contract confidently. Which is pretty shit, considering there are customers out there who do come in asking for a phone on a contract. Which means every customer who wants to do a phone contract has to wait around until you can manage to nab a specialist who can 'reverse shadow' or watch you do the contract, because you're terrified of making a mistake. Because screw up something like a contract and shit will go down, whether it's with the phone carrier or the customer.
-Customers grossly overestimating the amount of knowledge specialists actually have (sales assistant would be a more fitting term). I've never worked at a job where there are like 6 moments a day at least where you don't know how to do something (sim swap, phone contract, reuse recycle, financing, blah blah blah) or you don't have access to a system because your username/password doesn't work, or a customer asks a not even that complicated question which you and 3 coworkers you ask don't know the answer to and have to google in front of the customer and hope that Macrumours isn't the first link that pops up.
My last 4 shifts are at the start of the Iphone 6s launch. That'll be interesting. At least there'll be something to do at each shift. My pet peeve is when there are no customers and the store is dead. And there's pressure to socialise with all your coworkers which I can't do when I'm anxious, which at the Apple store is always.
APPLE IS THE EPITOME OF A GLORIFIED RETAIL JOB.
I still love the brand itself, and the fact that employees get 25% off everything plus $700 credit towards a Mac purchase every year and a free gym membership and phone contract discounts and money towards educational courses and a bunch of other benefits. It's amazing to be able to buy a $2799 retina 5k imac for like $1300. But there's one thing that disappoints me a lot and that's the amount of pay the specialists get. We work our asses off, walking around seeing if people need help. Having to talk and socialise and converse and promote Apple for 4 hours straight without a break sometimes. Spending 30 minutes trying to fix people's goddamn Apple ID issues. Having customers who don't understand that bigpond.com has nothing to do with Apple, and proceed to senselessly abuse you when you explain to them that you can't magically recover their bigpond password for them. For $20 an hour I'll have a much easier time sitting at the Greyhound desk selling bus tickets, thanks very much.
At the end of the day, Apple is just to cultish in the culture it tries to make its employees forge. The mindset is very 'we're loyal Apple fans, we get up at 3am in the morning to watch the latest products keynote, we research the hell out of everything in our spare time because we have nothing better to do, we love our customers, all hail the customer, the customer can do no wrong, we're literally going to grovel at our customers' feet even if they try to return something that's 3 months past its return date'.
And for that I'll be glad never to work at Apple for the rest of my life, no matter how shiny it makes my resume look.
