Apple Stores: Worst Idea Ever

My headphones currently play in one ear and intermittantly in the other, because I have broken something in their cable, so today I attempted to get some new headphones.

Unfortunately the Apple Store, which was the only place in the end of town I happened to be in which I knew sold over-ear headphones (can't wear in-ear ones, my ears are too scrawny and pathetic), is SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to make me have a hideous freakout in the middle of town.

It is full of flashing things and loud noises. The headphones I wanted were at ceiling height - far too high for me to reach, although my husband could do it.

And there is no queuing system.

I took a long time to learn how to use shops. It requires interacting with strangers, which is never going to be the easiest thing in the world. So I learnt The Shop Script. You get your stuff and you take it to the Please Pay Here desk and you wait in line and talk to the person who is contained behind a desk and it is all very neat and orderly.

Except that isn't good enough for the Apple Store. It has a Genius Bar, but that's some kind of tech support thing, right?

No, you have to approach a shop assistant wandering around and basically implore them to take your money.

So we tried this. We approached one of the shop staff, and asked how to pay for something. They were just about to start doing a demo, to a whole table full of people now staring at our webcam image on their screens.

They indicated another member of staff, who was already besieged by at least two sets of people from different directions. This member of staff finished dealing with one person, went to the next one in the kind of line/huddle system that was forming ad hoc around them, and apologised to the rest of us that they would be a couple of minutes.

Then they DISAPPEARED.

Literally. They vanished into the crowd and left us kind of stranded in the middle of this sea of people. No indication of who else was in front of us, whether we needed to go and stand somewhere in particular...

Well, obviously now we should wait and they will come back in a couple of minutes. But there is very little which sets me off more than Standing And Waiting Somewhere Crowded And Noisy Where I'm In The Way, especially if the waiting is for a indefinite period of time / there are no indications of progress towards a resolution.

And some time later (I'd like to say 'five minutes' but I am acutely aware my time sense goes entirely haywire in these circumstances) I saw what seemed to be them, emerging from a back door, and hooking up with an entirely different customer I'd never seen before.

At this point I made tienelle put the headphones back and we bailed.

So I still don't have working headphones (which are kind of useful for getting to work because it gives me a Sorry I Didn't Hear You / I Don't Want To Talk To You social flag and blocks out Unexpected Noises) and am left with a strong desire to do violence to whoever thought that was a better way to sell things to people than the nice conventional wait-in-a-line method.