This Apple Store Prepared For The Rapture By Building It Into The Employee Schedule

If anyone was going to ascend naked directly into heaven as beings made entirely out of light, it’s the guys who work for Apple, and while it may not have happened on May 21st as it was supposed to, at least one Apple Store prepared for the Rapture.

Here’s the employee schedule as it was posted for all the Geniuses in one unnamed Apple Store over the weekend:

The excellent ifoAppleStore explains the image:

A photo of an Apple store Red Zone employee schedule has appeared on-line, joking that the workday would abruptly end at 6 p.m. on May 21st, coinciding with the predicted arrival of “Rapture,” a religious day of judgement. But the colorful schedule also helps indicate how the Red Zone (front) section of the store is staffed by Specialists, including how staffing is increased from opening time, the rotation of duties, the number of full and part-time employees, and how lunch periods are staggered. The Apple stores use an on-line software scheduling system to manage staffing, although the photo appears to show a printed version of the joke schedule.

Each employee assignment is color-coded on the schedule chart, with employees starting work at different times. In this joke version, everyone’s work day ends at 6 p.m. In the legend (bottom), “WS stands for “workshop,” and the others are self-explanatory. The names of employees (left) were deleted on the posted photo. The schedule was originally posted in a Tweet from GeniusBarTales.

Of course, the Rapture didn’t happen at 6pm on May 21st, but that’s only because Rapture Cult founder Harold Camping claims he forgot to carry the two: it’s now scheduled for October 21st. Let’s hope that doesn’t conflict with the launch of the iPhone 5.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.