Notes
On Yee’s first day at Tekserve, he was given an employee handbook that concluded with the statement, “If you are ever in doubt, do the right thing.”
She has found her calling. One that draws on her full mind and body. A noble calling that helps people make poetry and do their taxes.
Customers came to the second floor depressed, clutching their ailing computers, to find a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine, complete with mutated elves. Hearts would melt, Coca-Cola would flow from glass bottles, and customers would wait patiently for their number to be called.
Patty gives Claire a last bit of advice. “If you don’t know something, don’t make like you do. David’s cardinal rule is: Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.”
Claire asks how to bill for the calls. Joel tells her not to, that it is 100% free, a goodwill thing. In the eyes of Dick and David, anything that makes a Mac user happy is good for Tekserve.
When Jobs presented the campaign, he said none of these geniuses ever used computers, but if they had, you know that they would have used a Mac. Claire thought this was fucked up to say. But… also true.
The Michigan hospital Deb was born in burned to the ground the day after she was delivered. She took this as a sign she was not meant for the Midwest.
No other shop in New York does data recovery. The service barely exists. There are experts in California that charge fifteen hundred dollars a drive. They operate from a clean room with a staff that wears bunny suits and enters through air locks.
Forest Hills is famous for begetting the punk band the Ramones, with their short tight songs. It also bore the makers of ZipIt and StuffIt, early file compression software for the Mac.
Claire’s fingers stretch across a customer’s keyboard in Tekserve’s gang sign. She presses down command-option-P-R and waits until the machine’s start-up sound repeats three times. The P-ram is zapped. Which is code for resetting the parameter RAM, the part of the computer that stores its core character—the sounds it makes, its preferences, its conception of time, its habits good and bad.