“Are you ready to drink the Kool-Aid?” my friend Holly asked while I checked out the red tee shirted regiment of twenty-something sales clerks at the Apple Store in the Old Orchard Mall.  At the time, I didn’t even think about how fitting it was that I would be looking for an Apple in an Old Orchard.

I was a little numb amidst the beehive of activity that swirled around me. It was hard for me to believe that so much business was being conducted in such an open space  — with minimal inventory on display and no cash registers present.

I had been contemplating retiring my Dell desktop for some time and was wondering if the saying had any validity, Once you go Mac, you never go back.  I was weighing my options; trying to balance the extreme loyalty Apple users seem to have for their brand against my own perception of myself as a slow adapter, a slow learner, when it comes to technology.

I am not a Luddite, I would explain to people, but I have never owned a laptop, don’t own a smart phone, and have never had teenage children to consult for tech support.  Still, recent consumer feedback was compelling.  A lot of people may like their HP or Lenovo or Dell PC, but I can’t think of them loving their computers.  Macophiles love their machines.

I won’t deny it.  I wanted to fall in love.

When the Apple Store clerk processed my order, it included a year of unlimited one to one training.  Some of my more computer savvy friends scoffed at the idea of training.  “You don’t need training. Just Google your questions,” they’d say. One friend who had experience with both platforms simply advised, “Just remember that when you press delete, you are backspacing.”

Moving from a PC platform to a Mac platform was – IS – a big deal to me.  I use my computer to do paid research work, to communicate with my peeps and to blog. I use my computer to write all sorts of things.  Learning a new platform is like learning a new language.

This was made very clear to me during my first one to one session.  When I tried to execute a basic task of file management and navigation referring to how I performed the task in a Windows/PC environment, I asked my trainer to confirm how to accomplish this in Mac motions or commands. “So, doing this will take me back to the desktop, right?” I asked.

“First,” my guide said then shook his head, having learned Apple-ese as his original form of communication.  “You have to learn the language.  We  refer to this as Mission Control.”

I was sort of taken aback by the almost pompous sounding term, likening the world of personal computing to space exploration.  And yet learning this new tool for communicating, for organizing my thoughts, almost seemed as ambitious, as unnatual as manned space travel.

So jumping into this new Mac World scares me a little. I know myself to have a low frustration tolerance and while I am equipping myself with a book on switching from a PC to a Mac (by a New York Times technology writer, no less) and I signed up for a year of one to one sessions, when I want to do something on a computer, I just want to do it. I don’t want to figure out how.

No matter what I do, short of having the necessary understandings imported into my brain like I might transfer a contact list, I recognize that the only way I am going to find my way is by finding my way; by experimenting.

And isn’t this the point of trying something new, really new.  My new Air — unlike a car that only feels new while it still has that smell  — this toy, I mean tool, will feel new as long as I am discovering new things.

Re-training your mind to embrace uncertainty and experimentation is no small thing.