Retail sales manuals have always been a triumph of hope over reality. The trainers seek to imbue the putative new staff at, say, Dixons with a friendly, customer-focused, sales-oriented method, turning them into smart, sleek sales machines. But the result is an army of dense, slightly scruffy Herberts.

Not at the super-groovy Apple Store, though, which only employs smart, stylish, good-looking and unbelievably clever people – Apple Geniuses, no less.

The shops even have built-in riff-raff detectors on the doors to keep the seriously unstylish out, or so we’re told.
But now Apple’s secret has been leaked, with the publication online of Apple Store’s “Genius Training Student Workbook”. And the secret, it would seem, is to employ the kind of gullible people who might be attracted to Scientology, if only they had Tom Cruise’s money.

The Student Workbook includes an Orwellian language guide because, of course, Apple products never “crash” or “freeze”, they merely “stop responding”. And staff are encouraged to give each other “fearless feedback”, ie to criticise each other in a passive-aggressive manner.

The manual also includes a guide for reading customers’ body language. Or as one blogger put it, “you’ll find psychological profiling, banned words and lessons on how to capitalise on human emotion, with sales being maximised via crowbarred ambience and cod-empathy”.

Quite possibly the biggest barrier to wider Apple Mac ownership is that palpable ‘air of smug’ that pervades the average user – who wants to belong to such a tribe?

But there are other good reasons to avoid Mac ownership – you might just be taken for a mug.

According to the Wall Street Journal, travel company Orbitz has found that Mac users spend, on average, 30 per cent more on their holidays than non-Mac hoi polloi, and 40 per cent more likely to book into four and five star hotels.

As such, it’s now using that intelligence to offer Mac users more expensive hotels and hotel rooms when they come looking for a holiday deal.

Which is all the more reason to avoid the Four Seasons Hotel and to stay at the Skegness Travelodge this summer. Again.

In more evidence that Apple technology will shortly turn the entire planet into drooling cretins, a Los Angeles animal shelter that lets its cats chase toys on top of iPads is selling the artwork that they generate for $5.99 a smudge. The art looks exactly as you’d imagine a touchscreen device, running an app called “Paint for Cats”, that’s had a cat running around on it, would look. The art will clearly be keenly sought by collectors of random blobs of colour. The shelter president told Associated Press that the cats had so much fun, they are going to buy some more iPads. So, to sum up: the profit from consumers buying random stuff made by cats running around on iPads will be used to buy more iPads so cats can run around on them and make more random stuff to sell. Can’t we just send all our money to Apple in an envelope, to speed the process up?

Kudos to Read Write Web, which has published its second round-up of the worst Tech Tattoos. Actually, it is called “The Best (and Worst)…”, but we’re struggling to identify the best ones.
On the other hand, among the obligatory Steve Jobs tributes and naff bits of code, there are more creative ways to embarrass yourself.

Our favourite: the guy who had CIE 4736 tattooed on his knuckles “because I have been a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert for over 10 years.”

If your colleague has a geeky tattoo, please send it to us. We’ll send a nude techie calendar for every one we publish.

This year we believe that the robots will finally take over, for which we’re extremely grateful. We haven’t had a decent afternoon’s kip on the Backbytes newsdesk since 2007.

So, as a good start, http://romotive.com/ will sell you a device to turn your smartphone into a little robot. You can download apps to make it dance (when it is strapped to its little cart), explore, or remote control it. And developers can create their own iOS apps to make it do things like play bad football and take over the world.

This is great, until your phone works out how to program itself.