Mat Duggan writes about being one of the rare official Apple repair techs sent out to people's homes to fix their Macs—the tier of important, rich or angry that doesn't get told to take it to the Genius Bar.
Our relationship to Apple was bizarre. Very few people at Apple even knew the program existed, seemingly only senior AppleCare support people. We could get audited for repair quality, but I don't remember that ever happening. Customer satisfaction was extremely important and basically determined the rate we got paid, so we were almost never late to appointments and typically tried to make the experience as nice as possible. Even Apple Store staff seemed baffled by us on the rare occasions we ran into each other.
There weren't a lot of us working in Chicago around 2008-2010, maybe 20 in total. The community was small and I quickly met most of my peers who worked at other independent retail shops. If our customer satisfaction numbers were high, Apple never really bothered us. They'd provide all the internal PDF repair guides, internal diagnostic tools and that was it.
It sounds like a cool job. An interesting thing about it was that it's was badly underpaid (Duggan reports $25k a year in the late 2000s) which is a terrible idea for people who end up with access to sensitive material, wealthy customers and the like. Sounds like these Apple contractors were honest, though.
