We bought a new computer a few weeks ago for our home; we chose a souped up notebook to replace the stand alone system simultaneously gaining precious space in our home office. The operating system, Windows 7, allowed for a seamless transfer of nearly all the data from our old desktop. Thousands upon thousands of photos and video files along with Word and Excel documents came streaming into the new expansive hard drive almost effortlessly. Everything was going great until our digital music came across and I took the opportunity to demonstrate what a wonderful job our new notebook was doing by playing one of Mitzi's digital downloads on the new platform. After listening to a few stanzas of the song I have now forgotten, my wife made the comment "I'd like to be able to put some of this music on a CD and play it in my car". Knowing that there is a trick, but not knowing the actual sleight of hand involved, I commented that transferring the music to a CD and expecting it to play in her 6 year old SUV's dashboard was not as easy as it might appear. Why, most of these files were MP3, I chortled and I was pretty darn sure her CD player wasn't going to be able to take those digital etchings and convert them to music. In fact, I further explained with all the typical arrogance husband's can muster in these situations, copying this music to a CD was old fashioned and most people born after 1965 put them on an iPod. Recognizing that we have a collection of 45 and 33 RPM Records (look it up if you don't know what they are), multiple shelves of cassette tapes (we jettisoned the 8 Tracks some years ago) and many more shelves full of CD recordings this threw Mitzi into a tizzy. She let me know in no uncertain terms that the iPod technology was nothing more than a cheap trick by electronics manufacturers to pry even more money from the grasp of consumers and having gone through the conversions from an actual record player to various tape players and then ultimately CD players and then repurchasing music 2 and 3 times to be able to be heard on the various devices was the end of the line for her. That was it - until I casually mentioned there was a good chance the next car she bought probably wouldn't include a CD player. In fact, I bragged, my new Honda had a direct connection for an iPod that would play the contents of the digital device through its fancy stereo system. After some further discussion we came to the conclusion we needed to adapt to the new fangled system for recorded music or risk being relegated to the trash heap of squaredom by our offspring and theirs.
The closest I had actually ever been to an iPod was when I bought one for my granddaughter, Sydney, as a Christmas gift 2 or 3 years ago. As with most of my shopping I had my daughter circle the item in the Target catalog that appears around Halloween every year and I grunted my way through the Target store after shoving the page into the hands of a somewhat helpful clerk making sure I exited the store with the "pink" one. I recollect the word "Nano" was involved but that's about it. I do remember Sydney was suitably pleased with the color. I also remember being shocked at the miniatureness of the device once it was extricated from the packaging, obviously designed to make you feel like you were getting your money's worth.Mitzi and I visited the local Best Buy on Sunday with hope of embarking upon our new adventure into the world of digital music on portable devices. What we found first were row upon row of accessories for attaching to one's iPod to elevate the volume, charge the battery, share headphones and ear buds and convert them into game playing devices or movie theaters. Not wanting to get distracted from the task at hand we only casually noticed these peripheral devices while searching for the actual Apple product which we ultimately located in a Fort Knox quality plexiglass display case. Peering through the inch thick plastic we observed a device not as thick and perhaps smaller in other dimension than a book of matches with a nearby label identifying it as an "iPod Shuffle" for something slightly under 50 bucks that looked more like a foil wrapped chocolate mint than a device for recording and playing music; An "iPod Classic" was next to it with a price tag of about $250 - I liked the sound of the name Classic; Framing the "Shuffle" and the "Classic" were various versions of a device referred to as "iPod Touch" touting massive amounts of memory and the ability to do everything that is part of your daily routine short of washing your car. The prices for the "Touch" devices ranged from $200 to $400 with the upper end of the range providing enough gigabytes of storage to apparently include every piece of recorded music that will ever exist. Being ill-prepared to make a choice among these offerings I could immediately feel my heart pounding out a rhythmic beat in my temples and my palms beginning to perspire.
As we simultaneously hyper-ventilated Mitzi's inclination was to summon a Salesperson which is Big Box lingo for Armed Robber in my way of thinking. My instincts told me to run out the door as quickly as I could. The last thing I wanted was to engage in a conversation regarding some digital device about which I knew only that it existed with some member of the appropriately named "Geek Squad". I envisioned myself leaving the store with an armload of accessories and and an extended warranty if I didn't escape at that very moment not to mention several hundred dollars poorer. "Let's talk to Sydney before we decide" I hollered over my shoulder as I waved goodbye to the Best Buy security cop upon my exit through the automatic doors.
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