the 2000s were a lawless hellscape of chumba wumba, shrek and apple stores where you had to have core strength to consume the product. the average apple employee had to be resilient enough to withstand half a dozen yoga balls per shift fired at terminal velocity from the endless batallions of corpulent arse fitted to cloistered exurban trophy wives who only want and consume. during the holidays it was a bloodbath of fat slippery arses embiggened in so much wetzel pretzel butter from the seldom sanitized food court catapulting plastic denizens of futurism into unsuspecting children and macbooks alike. these corporate wardogs also had to be savvy ebough to explain in plain english that 2000 era maps would inevitably plunge the family truckster off a cliff if given half a chance, and that the iphone 1 had to be charged six times a day for the privilege of flexing on karen bakowdkis shotty latke recipe in real-ish time.
i am drunk posting this from an android 12 i dropped in a toilet over new years. ours are a mystic people, cloaked in paradoxes of the ages like 'where did android save that file i downloaded' and 'what the hell is quick device connect'
Their writing style reminds of the youtuber Regular Car Reviews, and after reading their profile "about" section I'm now wondering if that's a possibility.
Interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about the downvotes to my comment. I think some of yall may be more disturbed than the fellow who I originally replied to.
I find it remarkable that there was chain-wide adjustment to seating without direct customer intervention — a good employee recognized the danger, and maybe felt gratitude for how benign the incident was, and immediately went up the chain and made a change without the person even mentioning it to management or lodging a complaint. Good on all persons involved.
Also love that the OP sat down to continue playing: that’s the only reasonable option after something like that happens.
I don't understand what actually happened. All the yoga balls I've encountered are pretty grippy and don't quite store enough energy to get airborne just from rolling off the side. If anything I would expect it to keep trying to roll over me once I hit the ground.
Ah you're right, I got distracted and only read up through the part where he sat back down to keep playing. No idea how one would launch a yoga ball then.
This is not an intellectually gratifying submission.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
It's literally just a story about someone being hit by a yoga ball because someone else sat on it wrong. Like, so what?
> It's literally just a story about someone being hit by a yoga ball because someone else sat on it wrong
I read it more as a story about that incident happening, then Apple introducing a pretty clever solution to it at that store, and then later at other Apple stores with yoga balls.
Sure, we cannot confirm the causal chain here for certain. But if it was indeed causal, then it is a pretty good story about a tech company taking feedback about a very small thing at an individual store level, quickly figuring out a neat fix to address it, and then rolling it out at other locations.
And yes, I would find it pretty interesting, even if it was the same story about a non-tech retailer as well. After all, how many times have we seen that famous story on the frontpage of HN about the Costco founder threatening the CEO if he ever even attempted to raise the price of Costco hotdogs? I've seen it myself quite a few times over the years, and it usually tends to generate a pretty lively discussion in the comments.
Problem solving comes in all shapes, forms, inspirations, and Smurfs.
Sometimes a customers problem is software. Sometimes it’s hardware. This was a customer demonstrating an edge case and the provider rapidly deploying a simple solution that also prevents physical injury/ liability.
I personally found it intellectually gratifying, maybe you didn’t. Just scroll on past it.
I don't know the technical but my quick thought is that slipping backwards stretched out the front of the rubbery ball.
Once the ball clears the ass, this material springs back to its natural position. The force of this return bounce is enough to send the light ball flying.
