exchange
While the week pressed on, I managed to stay up-beat at the bookstore, doing what I could to pass the slow stretches, and savoring the moments when my salesmanship was appreciated. Friday morning, as a hectic group was beginning to form lines for purchases, a man with a USMC cap came up to me. His daughter was going to be a freshman in interior design and he was accepting the grey hairs on his head as a job well done.
He mentioned immediately that he wanted to buy a Dell and I replied that all of the design departments at VT are switching to Macs at the pace of a stampede - the dual-booting being the clincher. His comment after my point was that if she bought a Mac, he wouldn’t be able to help her, assumably with technical support stuff. But, having been informed about the department-wide switch, he seemed only to stare. Not in anguish or distaste at the decision, but rather in grief, as if my point had been a machete to his connection with his daughter, some hundreds of miles away at school while her calls for technical support would go unanswered.
At that point, I paused. Something told me that this father didn’t care about technical support stuff, didn’t care about virus protection, didn’t desire to remote desktop his daughter’s computer. My Mac-centric point then was that she won’t have to deal with issues that often plague the PC platform, thereby allowing their mobile-to-mobile calls to be about the things that matter, instead of filling time with complaints of poor computing performance.
Let’s face it, I said, whether you buy a PC or a Mac, you’re daughter will be just fine and will have full compatibility within her major. Computers are just tools to help us keep up with the mainstream - it seems like we cannot escape them, even with passioned effort. In the university setting, your daughter’s laptop will enable her to grow in knowledge at a faster pace than without such an aid, in addition to preparing her for a working career likely strewn with computers. With a Mac, your phone conversations will be less infested with tech support and more full of the latest news from her courses, from her roommate situation, from which boys she’s met.
He seemed to follow me as I said these things, his stare turning into a glance, and a glance into realization.
I have no idea whether he bought a Mac or another machine. Dell isn’t supported at VT because the company doesn’t play nice with the university bookstore where maintenance is addressed. Plus, I don’t take care of sales, just the selling. Plus, I don’t care if he bought a Mac. That wasn’t the point of what I told him. He shouldn’t hold technical support as a leash to his daughter when he can just be transparent about how clearly proud he is of his daughter’s university entrance, maybe even informing her overtly.
It is wonderful to see how much some of these parents love their kids. Truly wonderful.