Last Sunday, I was looking after the kids for the morning to give my wife some R&R. I needed to head to the shopping centre (mall) in Milton Keynes, so whilst I was there, I decided to “drop in” to the new Apple retail store (as geeks do). OK, so it’s an Apple Store – light and airy – even if it is shoehorned into a standard retail unit (this is Milton Keynes, not Regent Street!) and it sure as hell beats the old “Apple Store” in Tesco! I wanted to pick up a copy of VMware Fusion and an for my iPod so that it can remain protected when I plug it into the iPod dock in my wife’s new Volkswagen.

I managed to get the last copy of VMware Fusion but was out of luck on the invisibleSHIELD (the “genius” I spoke to had never heard of it and tried to sell me a normal case), then I made the mistake of trying to leave the store…

I already mentioned that I had my children with me but I didn’t point out that they are aged 3 and 1, and as I wanted to move at a reasonable pace, they were both riding in a double pushchair. Being just a normal retail unit, it has a small lift, at the end of a short corridor at the back of the store, but it is definitely for customer use. I wheeled in the pushchair, my son pressed the button to go down and we moved the vast distance of about 18 inches before the lift stopped and there was a feint beep. I pushed the buttons but nothing happened. I tried to open the door but it was locked. I picked up the intercom but there was no dial tone – and no-one answering. At this point I was worried. It seemed I was stuck in a lift with 2 toddlers and no obvious way to call for help.

Purely by chance I moved the pushchair and the beep stopped. Then I pushed the button and the lift began to move. It seems that the sound was an alarm that cuts in when sensors detect that the lift occupants are too close to the edge (it’s the sort of lift that has a moving platform rather than a closed “box”) but where were the safety notices? And why hadn’t the intercom worked when I picked it up? Should I have pressed another button? I don’t know – there were no instructions!

It seems that Apple expects its customers to be technical enough to work these things out for themselves. Or maybe the display of some safety notices in the lift runs contrary to the aesthetics of an Apple retail store…