First day of actual training. Well not really.

Now fully badged we are ready to roam the campus, not so fast. We are instantly ushered from 1 Infinite loop, off-campus down to Bubb Road. What the hell! We thought we were going to rubbing elbows with Phil "Pentium toaster" Schiller and Mr. Jobs himself. Not in some dank office building on "Bubb" road. It sounds like a noise you make after eating too many tacos. So here we are miles from the mother ship to train how to be a genius. At this moment we all realized collectively, that we actually had no idea what we were going to do as a "genius". As we entered the lobby we are greeted by our trainers. Jim, Tim and Uncle Al. Jim was our trainer and was one cool customer. Jim knew the Mac like nobody business and was like everyone's dad, we would screw around and he would fatherly get is back into focus. Not a bad skill to have with a bunch of egos fueled late 20 somethings. Tim was younger and I believe a former army ranger, not really, but he was much more strict and serious. However, he was the only trainer to allow his student to work on laptops, something we were not allowed to do until about 2003. Uncle Al was a bottomless pit of knowledge and information. Just about anything Applecare, Apple and everything in kBase, Apples Knowledgebase. As I remember he was also the most vocal and intense of the trainers. I recall on one occasion, Uncle Al laying into a group of "students" for them not taking the training seriously. No, it was not my group, they were coming in late after partying too much and taking long lunches. Our group was not a bunch of priests, but I'll get to that later, trust me. On the first day, the ground rules were laid down and expectations were set. We were also informed we would be actually fixing the machines! This was something I was not prepared for. I tinkered and such but never have I ever taken apart a machine, or put it back together and had it work. So the purpose of the training was two-fold, one to learn how to be a world class customer service representative for Apple, the second was to repair computers. Take them apart and put them back together. This was the start of a new adventure and for the first time in my life, I wasn't sure I was prepared to endeavor.

So today was the beginning of what has become a 15-year journey of fixing things and as you will find out, fixing people. One thing to note is we began working on machines of the 2001 vintage, this includes CRT's. I'll later describe how scary this was.