When Woz personally delivers your Apple computer
Just posted to YouTube is a video of Steve Wozniak delivering a young girl's surprise iMac, because, well, surprise. Woz also admits that he sometimes calls people pretending to be Apple customer support, just for the fun of it.
I'm not sure I'd like a strange old man with a gray beard and a white suit delivering my KFC.
I also don't know how I'd feel if the haunting features of Keith Olbermann suddenly appeared to plug in my cable service.
Somehow, though, the sight of Steve Wozniak turning up at your door to say "Hey, here's a new iMac for you" might be rather charming.
And, in real life, it is.
I am grateful to Gizmodo for spotting some recently posted footage of Woz and his wife, Janet, turning up to surprise a young girl.
Posted to YouTube by someone with the charming moniker Buster Doggboye, the footage -- taken a few years ago -- shows Woz and his wife turning up at the door of Emma and her family, with large iMac box in tow.
Emma's dad explains that he posted the video with Woz's permission and that it seemed like " having your lightbulbs delivered by Thomas Edison."
Emma and her sister Elizabeth were both "Apple fankids," a new sub-sect of the Apple faithful. Their friends, said dad, only knew him from "Dancing With The Stars. Oh, he left his mark all over the dance floor.
Having delivered the iMac to a delirious Emma, he was kind enough not to leave Elizabeth out -- she got an iPod Touch.
Woz explained to Gizmodo: "An email-only acquaintance, Peter Fraser, came up with the idea and asked if I'd do it. I met him around the block to get the computer from him. After a short wait I drove to his house and surprised his daughter. But I had to keep driving to Tahoe that evening."
Woz also admitted that when he meets people during personal appearances, he sometimes take the phone numbers of their loved ones and then calls them up, pretending to be Apple support.
He explained: "It's like a satisfaction survey. I either give my name early on or later and I ask the questions straight-faced, like I really do it for Apple."
I wonder how many complaints he gets.