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| My Volunteer day at CompUSA.
The iMac always had a crowd around it.
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Friday afternoon my promotional package arrived from Apple. As rumored, not only did I receive my white polo shirt with the Sherlock/OS8 logo, but also a MacOS 8.5 CD. Thanks Apple!
I was the first volunteer to arrive at 9:30 am, Saturday morning to an already busy CompUSA. The Apple "Store within a Store" looked to be in fairly good shape (as it usually is at this location).
I brought my own Powerbook 3400 because I suspected the display machines would still be running 8.1 - and I was correct.
In a quiet corner of the store, I setup the Powerbook with an Irez video capture PC Card, and fed it with a signal from my Sony Camcorder. My lowly 603 chip did an admirable job looping the "No Beige" TV commercial while displaying Zoom Video from the camcorder in Apple's Video Player. It looked good.
I also "Web Archived" several of my favorite sites and had them ready to display as sources of information on MacOS 8.5. Since none of the computers had internet access, this proved to be a handy way to demonstrate it.
Tons of software filled the shelves.
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I was ready for the crowds.
And they did come, even though it poured rain all day. There was steady stream of people through the area, and just about everyone left with a box of 8.5.
In the four hours I was there, four iMacs and a G3 went out the door - all sold by volunteers. In addition, dozens of other software packages, modems, printers, and other miscellany were also sold.
The volunteers were great. Most were twenty-somethings, making me the old man of the group, but I was thoroughly impressed with their knowledge. It's too bad Apple and CompUSA can't afford to hire people as skilled as this volunteer staff, because Mac market share would skyrocket.
The customers visiting the "Store within a Store" were from all walks of life, and not just the educators and media people I had expected. They asked a wide range of questions, but some patterns emerged. People want voice recognition on the Mac. I'm not talking lightwight PlainTalk; they want NaturallySpeaking. Another common concern is the conversion from older Mac peripherals to USB. Unfortunately, CompUSA only had hubs in stock - no serial, ADB, or SCSI to USB convertors, so we couldn't demonstrate how (hopefully) easy this will be.
Another hot topic of conversation was Sherlock. With my hard disk already indexed, I was able to readily demonstrate the "Find by Content" feature. Hey, it really does work!
A happy Macintosh user.
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One woman came by with her two children, ages 8 and 10. She was searching for games that were not too violent, and may even be educational. The little boy wanted "Myth" after he noticed all the bloody characters on the box, but Mom compromised with "Dark Forces" and "Creatures" for her daughter.
As she was thanking me for assisting her, she flipped the box over and noticed the MacOS logo. "But I have a Windows Computer!", she cried. "Don't worry", I assured her, "most of the best Mac games have also been ported to Windows." :) |
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