This is your brain on Apple Genius training.

 

Walk into any Apple Store, sidle up to any Genius Bar, and yes, you'll meet an Apple Genius. But who died and made them so special? We wanted to know the whos, whats, and whys of becoming an Apple Genius - you know, the folks who staff the onsite tech support service known as the Genius Bar at many Apple Stores. We found two Geniuses who would share their experiences.

 

But first, a bit of history: It might seem hard to believe, but there was a time in the not-so-distant past of 2001 that magazines such as BusinessWeek screamed, "Sorry, Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work." Retail consultants and online chatterers fell all over themselves to join the nay-saying chorus - some chiming in right up until the moment it was reported that Apple's 174 stores generate $4,032 in annual sales per square foot. That beats Best Buy, Saks, and even Tiffany & Co.

 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is a textbook example of how to do things right. Apple's retail success spoke for itself when its stores reached $1 billion in annual sales faster than any retailer in history. That was in 2004. In 2006? Sales reached $1 billion a quarter.

 

So yeah, we'll chalk that up to genius. Steve Jobs told Fortune that it doesn't matter if the customer knows about all the work that went into the store: "They just feel it. They feel that something's a little different." Part of that difference is clearly Apple's take on the whole retail experience. And since nothing seems a more significant part of this than the on-the-spot help you get when you pull up a stool at the Genius Bar - we can count the geniuses we've met at Fry's and Best Buy on one hand - we decided to tug on the coattails of a couple resident Geniuses to get an inside look at life behind the Bar.

 

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>> HELP!!!

 

For this article, we relied on conversations with two Geniuses: one current (and anonymous, "just to be on the safe side") and one former, Jeremy Derr, who's the cofounder of Heroic Efforts Data Recovery in Austin, Texas. In explaining his need to remain anonymous, the current Apple Genius told us that Apple's policy requires Geniuses (and most other Apple employees, for that matter) to refrain from discussing the company's hiring and training processes. With so much riding on keeping Apple's supersecret sauce, well, secret, this makes a ton of sense. It also made us a little more than curious about what goes into Geniusology. (Apple declined to comment for this article.)

 

Derr and our anonymous Genius were happy to give us the download on what kind of problems people bring to Apple Store support technicians, what it's like to work the Bar day to day, and how you go from garden-variety geek to Genius in the first place.

 

"Well, probably something like 70 percent of the stuff we see - laptops, desktops, iPods - are just things that are very simply physically damaged by the customer," the anonymous Genius says. (Take a minute, as we did, to inventory your recent history of bad-owner accidents. Ours included dropping laptops, spilling Gatorade into our keyboards, and yanking the headphone cord out of an iPod so carelessly that the plastic input ring chipped off.) "Do people realize that when you buy an electronic device, the warranties don't cover physical or ‘accidental' damage? You break your iPod and - I'd never say this to a customer - but the Genius Bar is not for you. Go to the store's front desk and give it to the iPod recycling program, or go to iPodResQ.com. That'd save a ton of time, because we just can't help you."

 

And with a special nod to lots of Mac|Life readers, not to mention staffers, he adds: "People should also stop using extensive 'mods' on their OS. It always causes problems. Oh yeah, and everyone should back up. That way when their system is corrupted by LimeWire and we reformat their hard drives, they won't complain."

 

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Former Genius Jeremy Derr was a member of one of the first graduating classes of Mac masters. In 2002, his first gig as Genius-in- Residence took place in a mall that had hotels on site, the nearest being about 100 feet away. We all know what comes with a hotel, right? (Gold star if you guessed "hotel bar.") When Genius Bar wait times stretched longer than the time it took to browse nearby iPod gear, more than a few customers would inevitably wander over to the hotel bar. Drunken computer anarchy ensued, Derr says, but even this couldn't make the sheer unpredictability of daily life in retail any saner.

 

"You get to meet a lot of certifiably loony people," says Derr. "One of my most memorable customers ever, I called him Dr. Jekyll, was easily one of the most intelligent and well-spoken people I've ever met - when medicated. When not, he was so far off the tinfoil-hat-wearing, black-helicopter-chasing deep end, he makes [syndicated radio host] Alex Jones look completely reasonable."

 

And the customer's problem was?

 

"He brought in his Power Mac G5 because he was absolutely convinced he had either been hacked or had acquired a boot-sector virus. He could barely speak complete sentences, could hardly control the mouse, and I had severe doubts about his ability to key in his password. He said the hackers or viruses had made his ‘root file' read-only so that he couldn't fix it. Unsure what he meant by 'root file,' and unable to get a better explanation from him, I poked in the Terminal and found nothing to substantiate this. It seriously perturbed him that I couldn't see what was wrong."

 

Eventually, Derr decided it was best to assure the customer that he'd take care of the problem and even replace his hard drive if necessary - of course, since there was nothing wrong with it, Derr didn't actually plan to do anything to the machine. "A few days later, he showed up to pick up the 'fixed' computer, and I could hardly believe it was the same person. He apologized for his odd behavior earlier in the week."

 

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>> SO YOU WANNA BE A GENIUS?

 

Huge amounts of patience? Check. A fiery desire to show the world all the cool stuff you know about Macs? Check. That's a good start.

 

But hidden behind the Apple Iron Curtain, there's a whole process that gives one the necessary leg-up on Geniushood. The process begins with a battery of tech questions: "The tech screen is not about how to use iDVD or iTunes, either," says Derr. "It's about how to fix broken stuff: If your Mac starts up and this happens, how do you fix it?"

 

Knowing all (or a good majority) of the answers gets you a pass. And after that, you go straight to Go, in this case "the mother ship" in Cupertino for two weeks of 9-to-6 sessions that include acquiring three Apple certifications: OS, Desktop, and Portable. "They're not superhard," says the current Apple Genius of the certification exams, "but they do require studying, and you have to recertify every year."

 

Next, prospective Geniuses are shuttled off to Apple's Retail complex, which, at the time that Derr attended training, was held in a semisecret location in another part of Silicon Valley. The trainees were ensconced in half of a building devoted exclusively to real-world training (the other half was Apple Retail's headquarters) and bounced between classrooms and equipment rooms.

 

"The actual content of the training was straight out of the Apple Certified Desktop Technician (ACDT) manual," Derr says. Mix in some heaping helpings of ticketing system training - methodologies and processes for entering basic info about a computer's problems in the database - and you have one week devoted directly to the ACDT manual and the other week devoted to what Derr describes as "Apple-Eyes-Only kind of stuff." The latter basically amounted to "learning the ins and outs of AppleCare (the division, not the plan) policy, Apple internal policies, discussions about future changes in policy and finding information within the company, systems usage, and so on," says Derr.

 

With most Genius training classes weighing in at around 20 per, there was a chance to get to know fellow trainees. There was also quite a bit of role-play in a mocked-up Apple Store, where Geniuses played at being hostile customers or practiced talking to novices without making them feel subhuman. After two weeks in Apple's Potemkin village of a training store, it was time to do a little wing spreading: two more weeks in a real store somewhere near the Genius's home store for some on-the-job, live-customer training. And if a Genius is starting at a brand-new store, he or she gets two more weeks of training on customer service soft-skills.

 

And then they're done. Welcome to Genius Land.

 

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>> IT'S OFFICIAL

 

The newly minted Mac Geniuses are full-time, benefits-bearing employees with workloads that are structured and split between helping customers - medicated or not - and turning screwdrivers on hardware repairs in the back room. Out of sight of the public's peering eyes, the back room probably wouldn't look like much to the untrained eye. Derr clears up any misconceptions right away. "Deep, philosophical debates about metaphysics, classical literature, favored philosophers and authors, and theological issues are what we talked about" in the back room, he says. "Typical geek banter too...trade shows, music talk. We even had some hardcore gamers, enough so that we ran our own Battlefield 1942 and Halo servers after-hours, and fragged each other relentlessly."

 

More highlights from Derr's time as a Genius: Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller "dropping by and gushing a little about the importance of Apple Retail and how much he appreciated us," says Derr. "Also, the week of a grand opening is pretty cool." The entire innards of a store are usually delivered to Apple at the beginning of a week prior to opening. Construction is completed over that week and subsequent weekend, and the products start showing up. Everybody unpacks and shelves the goodies and sets up. "Five days later, there's a line of 500 people slobbering on the window, waiting to get inside. And after the doors are flung open, everyone starts applauding. That was pretty cool too."

 

When asked if he enjoys preaching and teaching of the glories of Apple to the unanointed, our anonymous Genius says, "If I'm not arguing warranty status? Very much, yes."

 

Oh. Guess we better go find our warranty.

 

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>>> TALES FROM THE TRENCHES

 

Jeremy Derr's four years as an Apple Genius are largely immortalized on his altogether-too-fun website, Ungenius. Here's an excerpt.

 

FireWire Tom: Tom had FireWire problems. It took about five visits to convince Tom that his problem was with his enclosure, not his Mac. However, in all of his visits, Tom refused to work with any Genius except me. At this point, I was working mostly 1 p.m.-to-10 p.m. shifts, but Tom would often show up at 10 a.m. looking for me. With me not being in yet, and other Geniuses available, Tom would wait hours for my shift. When I arrived, he approached me before I could clock in. I would repeatedly tell him that my daily responsibilities meant that I wouldn't be at the Bar to help customers until the evening, so he should let one of the other Geniuses help him. No dice, Tom wanted me. And was perfectly willing to wait for me. And happy about it, no less.

 

One day, he walked in just as I was walking out for lunch. I explained that I was going to lunch, but that I'd be at the Bar to help him when I got back. Instead, Tom spun and followed me out the door. The food court in this mall was nowhere near the Apple Store, and Tom managed to follow me the entire way. He started asking technical questions, and I politely interrupted him. "I'm sorry, Tom. But I'm at lunch, and it's already been a long day. I'm off the clock."

 

Tom took this to mean that we should talk about nonwork and starts asking personal questions, like whether I'm married, my wife's age, do I have any kids, and such. Getting a little close to home, guy. I'd never had a stalker before. His insistence on working with me and then the suddenly not just personal, but invasively personal questions were starting an alarm in my head. Normally, I'd eat in the food court, but today I decided my sanity required a private lunch, so I headed back to the store. I explained to Tom that I had work to do over lunch and parted ways with him. About halfway back to the store, he caught back up to me and started chitchatting again. As we entered the store, I made a beeline to the employee door, and he managed to try to follow me back.

 

He let another Genius help him, after this. But that night, he ran into me as I was leaving and tried to follow me to my car...

 

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>> BONUS TIP: So You Really Want to Be a Genius?

Far be it from us to discourage anyone to go into a helping profession. But the current Apple Genius has a few words of advice: "There's not much of a market for full-time Mac IT pros except, perhaps, in academia. Everyone I know who's doing full-time Mac IT is doing it on a part-time consulting basis. They make good money, and it seems to be fairly rewarding, but their clients tend to be fairly Mac-savvy to begin with and have no need for full-time help. So for most, the Mac IT career path leads to self-employment and consulting." To check for openings and application requirements, see jobs.apple.com.