Babe in Toyland

A couple of weeks ago I got a notice from one of the online shopping site that I go to. It wanted me to know about this “exciting” deal they had for me. If I so choose, I could have my very own MP3 player/bluetooth/phone/DVD player!, okay, actually, it isn’t a DVD player, but it is all those other things.

I said to myself “Wow! an MP3 player! I want one of those!”. I’m not really sure what an MP3 player is but I know that all the really cool kids have them. I want to be one of the cool kids too!

But.

I’m not a kid and I’m not cool. I have no experience with coolness. I wasn’t one of the cool kids when I was a kid. I was at very best one of the lukewarm kids. I didn’t actually do anything cool, but I knew the names of the kids who did do cool things. I used sun in on my hair, I made it damaged and orange. Not as cool as the kids who made their hair pink and some how not damaged . I was in remedial cool.

Being old sadly does not keep you from wanting to be like the cool kids, in fact, it makes the desire to be cool even more pressing because once you get old, you can’t be a kid again at all. All you can do is try to be cool. The cool kids will laugh at you, but at least you can laugh at the rest of the adults and say “Well, at least I know what a JoJo is”. This does not make you cool, actually it makes you a little lame, but not as lame as listening to Rod Stewart sing the classics.

So. My cool toy arrived and I opened up the packaging and discovered really fast that I didn’t have any idea what to do with any of it. It took me an embarrassing long time to figure out that reason it would not turn on despite the fact I put the battery in it, was because the battery needed to be charged. Oops. Once charged, I was able to make the little thing glow red. I could not make it do anything else.

I bagged it and all of its various bells and whistles up and made an appointment with Alphagal to make it work.

Alphagal kindly read all the paper work for me and made it work.

She explained to me how I could make it work. She even loaded music on it to prove that while my toy was cheap, it did have the capacity to do what it was supposed to. Kind of, a real MP3 player holds hundreds if not thousands of titles. Mine holds about two albums worth.

I went home feeling very smart. I felt so smart that I decided I wanted to start with a clean slate and put my own music on my toy. I searched the house for CDs and gathered some favorites. While I was tossing the house looking for CDs, I allowed the computer to put a new version of Explorer on.

This was a mistake, not only could I not do what I wanted, everything looked different too.

I told the computer what Alphagal told me. The computer laughed. I cried. Dogger whimpered, I yelled at Dogger, the cats knocked things over, I yelled at the cats, I yelled at the computer. I called Alphagal and talked to Broskey who did a good job of not laughing.

I think I’m too old for “ripping” MP3s. I couldn’t make it work even with expert advice. My computer didn't even know what it was supposed to do. We're both lame and neither of us seems to have the right vocabulary. I know there are fourth graders the world over who can do this and there are in all likelyhood toddlers running around with Playskool kIdPods jamming to Barney tunes, good for them. I think I'll go listen to a cassette tape my jam box.