by Timmy Falcon
According a story published today on a major geek site, at least one Apple Store is so wildly corrupt that employees have been busting up iPhones just so they can get a free replacement, the manager traded discounts on Macs for free stomach stapling surgery, and the guys at the Genius Bar are likely to use your laptop as a surfboard if you look at them cross. It’s a fascinatingly complex tale which paints Apple retail as some kind of lawless, corrupt breeding ground for sociopath employees and a scary place you should never set foot in if you can help it. The story, however, is unsubstantiated beyond the fact that its author had a conversation with someone over instant message who claimed to be a former employee who personally witnessed all of this, none of which can apparently be substantiated. But it gets uglier…
We won’t name the publication in question, but let’s just say it’s the same one which paid five thousand dollars two years ago for a stolen iPhone 4 prototype, posted pictures of it online, refused to return it when Apple insisted, and then got its front door kicked in by a police raid. The publication has a serious axe to grind against Apple, and publishing the over the top fantasies of an “instant message buddy” who claims to have personally witnessed corruption on a spectacular level is a good way to extract revenge on the company. The guy’s claims span to such absurdities that it should be easy enough to see through them: everyone at Apple’s 24-hour call center is supposedly snorting cocaine all night while on the job (how would an Apple Store retail employee, who would never have visited the call center, even know this?). And then there’s the part where he claims his Apple coworkers were helping him cheat on his girlfriend at a strip club. Because if there’s one guy whose wild stories you want to believe, it’s a guy who brags about cheating on his girlfriend to a journalist…
In fairness the source does try to corroborate his story by bringing on another “former employee” to back him up on it, but that also happened via instant message (which means that the second “employee” was most likely just the first guy signed on with a separate account). The real truth is that most geeks, even the ones who use Apple products, despise Apple the company for catering to the mainstream while every other tech company caters to the geeks at the expense of the mainstream. So you’ve got one Apple-hating geek with a penchant for making up wild stories telling a whale’s tale to another Apple-hating geek who writes for a tech publication which got its front door kicked in by the police at Apple’s request, with a story which is so blitheringly over the top and rampant with massive corruption and theft and drugs and booze and strippers and liposuction that it’d be front page news if any of it were real, and yet somehow not a peep of it has ever leaked out until now. And the kicker is that at the end of the story is now an “update” which claims that several former Apple employees around the nation have written in to confirm that this kind of thing goes on at all Apple Stores nationwide. Translation: the Apple-hating geeks who read the Apple-hating publication wrote in also pretending to be former Apple employees so they could add to the phony notion that Apple Stores are some kind of coked up lawless thieving anarchist nightmare just shy of a Stephen King novel. We call BULLSHIT, in capital letters.
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