Etiquette for Genius Bar - mention Mac experience?

[deckeda]

Edit: I also like Mr Lynn's take on this.

BobC wrote:
... to get help with a somewhat complicated migration of one user account from an old SuperDuper iBook clone volume to a new MBP. I think I've got the simple stuff covered, but I have a bunch of questions about app support files, settings, and iPod sync options. …

Make a short list of the topics or items you want answered but let the Genius drive the conversation.

I'm not a Genius but here's what my reaction would be, if you feel it's helpful to let me know upfront you're highly experienced:

The fact that you've been a longtime Mac user would be mostly irrelevant to me—you're still in front of me asking for help, after all, so unless there's got a hardware defect your knowledge apparently isn't sufficient to guide me anyway.

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Really, don't stress over any of that stuff.

In the end what it comes down to is, you've got stuff you want to migrate. If it were me I'd use Migration Assistant and then go back and tweak what needs to be tweaked. Doing so preserves app support files and settings with a few inevitable hiccups Migration Assistant sometimes has. (But it still beats trying to manually transfer everything over.) Worse case, you can delete that user account, if not the whole hard drive, start over and do it via another method.

[JPK]

If (s)he is a true "Genius", they will listen to the way you explain the issue and will gage your level of expertise and will seek the appropriate level of technical discourse.

This is not the case with Comcast. Non of them are geniuses and the think all customers are idiots.

Good luck,
JPK

[rz]

I'll echo what the above have said. I work in technical support, and deal with people who have varying levels of technical proficiency. I can usually pretty much accurately gauge a user's level of expertise by the way the question is asked. If you outline your question with what you've done, and what you want to know, they should be able to jump right into it. Yeah, they'll probably say things you already know. Just be patient with them.

[BobC]

Thanks. Good points all around. It does seem better to use my questions to show, rather than tell.

And deckeda's take on the Migration Asst is what I have in mind, but want to get some confirmation/second opinions on the details of the tweaking from the Genius Bar. The current migration is actually a dry run, using a secondary backup clone and the MBP's factory-fresh Snow Leopard installation. Once I'm sure I know what I'm doing and it works, I'll wipe the MBP, re-install 10.6, and then repeat it for the real migration using the newest backup.

[bazookaman]

I made a point to inform the genius of all the troubleshooting I went through to get my dead ipod working. He told me that i sounded like knew what i was doing so how about we just replace this.