A little context for overseas readers; outside of Victoria which is having a second wave of infections right now, the rona was never widespread enough to mandate general mask wearing Downunder. That’ll probably change over the next couple of weeks, but there is one place where it's compulsory in Australia. The Apple Store.
I had to make a Genius Bar appointment on Saturday to get my AirPods Pro looked at because the right pod was a bit of a mess – crackling and buzzing and not really noise cancelling anymore. Long story short, they replaced the pod. Simple solution. Thanks Tim Apple.
However, anybody who's tried to walk into an Apple Store in the last couple of months will know that it's not at all simple. They don't encourage drop in visits. You need to go through a temperature check and answer a bunch of questions about possible viral exposure before joining a queue outside the store. They hand you the mask as you walk in.
Mine smelt like potato chips, which I appreciated. I wouldn’t say that it was an unbearable imposition. Probably somewhere on the wrong side of 'mildly uncomfortable' after a couple of minutes. And I did struggle with the urge to keep pulling the mask down whenever I spoke to the consultant.
I asked her how she was coping with the requirements, because she'd been living with them for months. She said it wasn't much fun, but what you gonna do.
Indeed. What are any of us going to do until a vaccine is ready or the virus has had its way with so many of us that the promised herd immunity kicks in. Just wear the damn mask, I guess.
Yeah as someone living in plague town I can attest to the use of masks is no big deal. One tip if you are wearing the blue hospital-style masks the blue bit should be on the outside, the flexible bit should go across your nose and these aren't underpants, you don't flip them over to extend the wear.
Humerous anecdote time thanks to a FB friend of mine whos a photojournalist in Shanghai.
When the pandemic first hit China the Apple stores were one of the first things to shut down and he was commissioned by the AFR to go and get a photo of the great Apple lockdown. He had to rush to make the print deadline so he pedalled his bicycle furiously to get there but once arrived they wouldn't let him inside. The exercise made the security guard's pistol-shaped electronic thermometer give an off-the scale reading from his forehead!
He wound up getting a suitable shot for the front page anyway :)
just a question . . . . did the mask smell like potato chips because Apple (TM) has a dossier on your likes and dislikes and personalise the mask to your dna or do they keep them and recycle to the next person and that just happened to be the last meal (in which case, eww)
The battery life on my mother's iPad Air finally became sufficiently annoying that she decided to spend some of my inheritance on a new one; I ordered everything online for her, and then she and Dad went to the Apple store to collect their new shiny. They went through the masking and temperature checking process like you did; mum took it in stride, as a retired registered nurse she's been masking up for decades, but Dad was amazed by the precautions at the Apple store just to spend 5 minutes picking up an online order (in the Independent Sovereign Nation of Westralia there was some public masking in the height of the pandemic, but as we've gotten closer to elimination in the state, it's dropped off).
At least they've been suitably impressed with the results of my online ordering skills (they now have a rose gold iPad with a pretty blue cover), and apart from the ordeal of getting masked up and temperature checked to get in the store, everything went wonderfully smoothly.
Yeah as someone living in plague town I can attest to the use of masks is no big deal. One tip if you are wearing the blue hospital-style masks the blue bit should be on the outside, the flexible bit should go across your nose and these aren't underpants, you don't flip them over to extend the wear.
Humerous anecdote time thanks to a FB friend of mine whos a photojournalist in Shanghai.
When the pandemic first hit China the Apple stores were one of the first things to shut down and he was commissioned by the AFR to go and get a photo of the great Apple lockdown. He had to rush to make the print deadline so he pedalled his bicycle furiously to get there but once arrived they wouldn't let him inside. The exercise made the security guard's pistol-shaped electronic thermometer give an off-the scale reading from his forehead!
He wound up getting a suitable shot for the front page anyway :)
just a question . . . . did the mask smell like potato chips because Apple (TM) has a dossier on your likes and dislikes and personalise the mask to your dna or do they keep them and recycle to the next person and that just happened to be the last meal (in which case, eww)
The battery life on my mother's iPad Air finally became sufficiently annoying that she decided to spend some of my inheritance on a new one; I ordered everything online for her, and then she and Dad went to the Apple store to collect their new shiny. They went through the masking and temperature checking process like you did; mum took it in stride, as a retired registered nurse she's been masking up for decades, but Dad was amazed by the precautions at the Apple store just to spend 5 minutes picking up an online order (in the Independent Sovereign Nation of Westralia there was some public masking in the height of the pandemic, but as we've gotten closer to elimination in the state, it's dropped off).
At least they've been suitably impressed with the results of my online ordering skills (they now have a rose gold iPad with a pretty blue cover), and apart from the ordeal of getting masked up and temperature checked to get in the store, everything went wonderfully smoothly.