Why Does This Sandwich Maker Have a Logic Board?

1. Who are you?

Andrey “Andrey Summers” Summers; Macinhome Consultant.

2. How long have you worked for Macinhome?

Almost a year. Almost.

3. What’s the most complicated Mac situation you’ve come across?

I once arrived at a gentleman’s home, having been dispatched to fix his email. Once onsite, I discovered that our client in this case was an elderly Japanese man who spoke little-to-no English, and was also quite hearing-impaired.

The computer he was having trouble with was a 2001-era “Kiva” iMac, running Mac OS 9. Within this operating system, the mail client he was using was Microsoft Outlook Express 5. Oh – and every single word was in Japanese.

As Macinhome Consultants, we are expected to communicate clearly with our clients. We are also expected to have a firm grasp on what we’re doing and be up to date on troubleshooting practices. I think you can see how being up-to-date and well-versed in English were almost entirely vestigial skill-sets in this case.

Luckily, the client and myself managed to understand just enough of what the other person was communicating to surmount the language/auditory barrier, and after some baffling poking around I managed to solve his problem in about half an hour.

Don’t ask me how I did it, though, because I still have absolutely no idea.

4. What’s the most frequent problem that you fix (at work)?

Dysfunctional email.

People tend to think of their email application as this mysterious, genie-like benefactor that stops bestowing you with letters when it’s displeased, or you’ve run out of wishes. Really, it’s more like a high-school locker with a combination lock. Sometimes, the lock sticks, but really as long as you have the combination, you’re okay.

In this scenario, your email provider is the popular girl who doesn’t remember your name, whose locker you’re desperately trying to break into.

5. What do you love about your job?

I experience a somewhat unhealthy, narcotic thrill when a client’s computer goes from being a pile of problems, and suddenly becomes the ultimate solution for their workflow, or lifestyle. It’s basically that moment that I’m chasing every day at work. Yeah, it sounds worrisome, but I’m reasonably sure that Macintosh isn’t a gateway drug.

At least not to anything but micro-transactions.

6. What’s the next piece of software/design feature/device that you’d like to see Apple bring to market?

I guess I’m supposed to say “the tablet”, but I’ve never really liked tablets. Honestly, I’d like them to find a way to lower the price of a new MacBook. The world would be so much calmer. When’s the last time you saw a terrorist on 24 hacking CTU’s mainframe on a Mac?

Editor’s Note: After writing this, Andrey started watching season 8 of 24 and was baffled to discover that now CTU does all their hacking on Macs! Also, CTU NY looks exactly like an Apple Store.

7.  What’s one Mac-maintenance habit you wished your clients would undertake on an ongoing basis?

Keep your Applications in the Applications folder! Surely you’ve seen what it’s called.

Andrey also writes for various websites! Look – we have proof!

Out Team Lead boldly goes where no man has fit before.

1. Who are you?

Corey “Toque” Zaytsoff; Team-Lead.

2. How long have you worked for Macinhome?

One and a half of your human years.

3. What’s the most complicated Mac situation you’ve come across?

Once upon a time, in a dark part of my history, I was a member of the Langley Best Buy Geek Squad. During this time, I became known for my skills with Apple Computers and had formed my own client base. During this time, there was a gentleman (30 years old) and his father (around 70) that came in to buy a MacBook Pro. The whole buying process took about 2 weeks for them as they had a lot of questions, but I found them to be enjoyable individuals. Then, two months later, the son came back in with a heavy look in his eyes.

It turns out that while he was at a friends house, his friend accidentally spilt a keg of beer on his MacBook Pro and the machine now refused to boot. To add to the tragedy, he had pictures of him and his dad on the machine which he had not backed up – pictures that needed to be recovered because his dad had recently passed away.

Buying that MacBook Pro was the last thing they did together.

I spent over 13 hours on that machine, disassembling it and cleaning each part of all the residue and replacing cables in hopes of getting it to boot. Because this was physical damage, neither Best Buy nor Apple would help the guy. I finally got the machine to work with the hard drive intact, pictures saved.

When asked the above question, most technicians will tell you about a highly complicated job based on a technical scale. However, given the nature of what we do, I find the emotional aspect can make a job so much harder. I always remind myself that even though a client’s computer is just metal and electricity to me, it has a soul to them and has to be handled with the utmost care.

This is what makes any job difficult.

4. What’s the most frequent problem that you fix (at work)?

Inter-office romance. And wireless problems.

5. What do you love about your job?

I’ve always loved problem solving! To come to a solution when everything seems dire – there’s no feeling like it. The people I work with keep my sanity in check though, by being completely insane themselves. Even when everything seems madness inducing, we always find a way to poke fun at each other and laugh.

Isn’t that right Audrey and Blair?

6. What’s the next piece of software/design feature/device that you’d like to see Apple bring to market?

Two things:

1) MacBook Tablet – Come on Apple, we know you’ve been ordering touch screens big enough to be tablets. Just release the damn things already!
2) Apple Netbook – Apple said it couldn’t make a netbook that wasn’t “junk”, but I own an Acer netbook (relax folks, I’m running Linux on it) and it runs fantastically. I’ve hacked a Dell netbook (can Apple sue me for that? I bought the copy of Leopard…) and it was the greatest little portable machine ever! If Apple dropped prices down into that area and created that little a machine (MacBook Air is technically portable, but is a bit glitchy in my opinion), their market share would skyrocket.

7.  What’s one Mac-maintenance habit you wished your clients would undertake on an ongoing basis?

Laptop owners – Clean your screens and organize your “Download” folder.
Desktop owners – If the images in your iPhoto library are of a private nature, don’t ask me to organize it for you!

I blush easy.

The Misused Monitor In Question

Macinhome Mobile Consultant (MMC) Blake Wickman is not a scientist. Anymore. He is, however, a self-proclaimed expert in the field of Brainology. As a brainologist, Blake has made some controversial discoveries regarding what he calls the “nerd-brain”. This tertiary growth between the cerebral cortex and cerebellum – divided into the Upper, and primal Lower nerd-brain, is what gives the select few people in whom it is developed the ability to over-complicate problems, and to deconstruct them to an inane degree, especially when a simple solution is readily available.

Macinhome hires only people with overdeveloped, almost tumorous nerd-brains. This recurring blog feature will be devoted to chronicling the complex, nerd-brain solutions MMCs came up with to problems that turned out to have rather simple outcomes. Hark, Nerding the Question:

MMC Andrey was sent out on one of his first solo jobs during his training period. The client was initially OK with his performance, but she called in later sounding pretty concerned. She had switched from Microsoft Entourage to Apple Mail (with Andrey’s help and at his insistence) When he’d left her everything had been working fine, but now when she opened her Mail Application, the window would not appear.

The client explained that the menu bar did, indeed, change to display Mail as the primary running application…but nothing to the tune of a list of emails would eclipse her desktop background. Nothing at all. Andrey was concerned, and his brain Nerded the Question.

He asked the client to quit out of Mail, restart the program and lastly, to restart the computer. No improvement. Nerding the question further, Andrey asked the client to click Window > Zoom, in case Spaces was running, and the mail window had shifted to one of the virtual desktops Spaces creates – this would center it in the current screen.

Nothing. Andrey began to feel the burn. He asked the client if he could call her back, and he got on the horn with a more elite Fully Trained MMC. A short discussion later, the Question had been Nerded to the nth degree, and it looked like the next move would have to be removing Mail’s Preferences file in <username>/Library/Preferences. , The client’s user accounts would have to be set up from scratch, but that would be a small price to pay in resolving this complex, software-based anomaly.

Back on the phone with the client, Andrey was about to walk her through toasting her Mail Preferences when a solar flare (or possibly a local microwave or cell-phone signal) suddenly caused his nerd brain to temporarily shut down. Able to think with his normal brain for a split second, Andrey suddenly remembered that the client had a secondary external monitor hooked up to her MacBook.

“Wait!” he said. “Your Mail isn’t displaying on your second monitor, is it?”

“Oh, no, no,” said the client, “The second monitor is off.”

“Would you mind turning it on for me?” asked Andrey delicately.

And there was the Mail window. Safe and sound on the second window. Just a power button away.

Before Nerding the Question, Remember: When you turn off an external secondary monitor, its contents are Still There.

Once all the IMAP setup was done at the client’s home, and once all the email had been copied out of their Inbox and Sent folders into local folders “On My Mac”, I took a backup snapshot of their Mail folder prior to removing the account from the Apple Mail preferences to leave them with just the sleek new Google IMAP account (removing an account in Mail deletes all the stored email for that account – yikes).

All was well when I left; they had all their emails and life was good.

A few days later, I got an email from the client saying a bunch of their mail was missing. I thought “how could that be? I know I got it all, and spot checked to be sure.”

I went to the client’s office and started digging around in the old mbox files. They had all their mail from what I could see… It did not make any sense.

With some pointed questions about the specific way the client was storing their email, I found that they actually press “Delete” on the messages they don’t need in the Inbox anymore, but never empty their Trash folder, so  those messages always come up in Spotlight searches when they need something.

I looked in the Mail backup on my portable LaCie Rugged, and sure enough, there was a Deleted Items mbox sitting pretty at 5.28GB.

Eureka! Saved by the spidey sense backup.

A couple of clicks and an Import… later, and all the messages were back; in a new folder On My Mac called Archive, of course.