Yup. There's a company called Arise (arise.com) that has contract workers who provide services to lots of companies including Apple. Basically, Arise is a contractor of Apple, and then I was a contractor of Arise. I had to form my own corporation in the state I lived in and then I was the employee of that company. It's basically just a way for Apple and Arise to cut costs, they don't have to pay benefits, follow labor laws, or pay into the social security system. In fact, they won't even do employment verification. They make a big deal about how being a contractor is better than being an employee...lol...so basically you take some introductory assessments to get into the general pool with Arise, then once you get in you have to pay to take what is called ACP 101 which is pretty much a BS course teaching you how to use the Arise systems, and the course costs quite a bit (maybe $150-200 or so). Then when you pass that there are various opportunities available. You can't know ahead of time what will be available. I got lucky and after waiting a month or so Apple showed up. Then you have to pay to take the course in training you to work for Apple. That was the part I almost couldn't bear. You have to either have a Mac or you buy a Mac mini from them and then also pay for the class on top of it (maybe like $200 or so). Then the class itself is a joke. I gave up trying to correct the misinformation about Apple products because I would get in trouble for it. No one else in the class really knew anything about Apple including the teacher.
So when the course is finished you can start posting hours. It can be very hard to find hours to work though. You get more hours if your performance is better (you get to pick hours earlier than other people). There is a LOT of pressure to sell, there are daily reports and nasty e-mails sent out. It's pretty crazy. At the end of it all I was one of many who was just terminated for the reason: "poor sales performance" even though I had just received accolades. I heard from some people closer to Arise that they will terminate people periodically so they can hire more people to get the training fees from them. They really have no way of measuring your product knowledge because they have so little themselves. And if you ever try correcting them you can get screamed at (they made me sign off work once unpaid and called me and screamed at me over the phone for trying to correct some blatant misinformation).
The main thing about most work from home outfits is that there is a lot of information coming at you from the top, but no way to contact anyone at the company itself. After I was terminated from Apple phone sales, I kept working Apple chat until one day I just couldn't log on. It took me a month to find out I had been terminated from that too and wasn't even paid for the time I was working and didn't know I had been terminated. I can send you to the underground forums where people discuss these horror stories about Arise and Apple.
I'm honestly not bitter any more. Just don't get me started on pay issues, incorrect performance reports, and all sorts of chaos that went on.... I loved working the phones and chat, well until we started having 3 chats nonstop. It used to be 2 at once and 3 occasionally but then they switched us to 3 at once and we had to respond to each line within 20 seconds. So, if you say, let me find that for you in the store, and they say thanks, you have to write something back within 20 seconds, which can be frustrating, especially having 3 chatters at once, a lot of them being prank chatters as well. And all the while worrying about your close ratio. (On the online store, we were supposed to move the customer toward a sale and if the people we chatted with purchased without closing their browser first we got credit for the sale. It's hard though with so many pranksters and people wanting tech support.)
I made some of my customers very happy--to them I was the face of Apple, and I was glad that I could help them--the only praise I ever got was from the customers themselves over the phone. And I loved being able to use my product knowledge so extensively and give the good information I knew a lot of other people weren't getting.
Been looking for work since then that I can do from home, but it's tough. I have to work from home for some rather complicated reasons I won't go into.
And if Arise is going to go after me for posting this, lol, well I don't really care any more.
You can go to
http://www.workplacelikehome.com and look in the forums under Arise then under Apple (it probably has it written like A**le or something) and look at some other people's experiences. They might write it with asterisks or call it the fruit.
EDIT: Forgot to mention more pay stuff, you pay for everything yourself, extra phone line, DSL, back up internet provider, phone equipment, headset, plus you pay arise about $40 a month for the benefit of using their technology to work for Apple. The pay rate for Apple was actually higher than most other opportunities, and was $10/hour, which I thought was pretty good actually compared to other work at home gigs I've had.
