My car still has a cassette deck built into the dash.
That appalling confession is weighing on me today, making me feel old, square and out of date, what with the recent report that Cadillac, Smart and Tesla automakers have already ditched the increasingly “archaic” CD player from their dashboards, and other car companies will soon be following suit.
This news came to me exactly one day after my lovely 13-year-old daughter informed me, “Daddy, CDs sure are worthless these days. I don’t even know when I last listened to some of these!”
We were in the process of transforming her “girl” bedroom into a “young woman” bedroom, and she had discovered a cache of CDs “from when [she] was little.” Which feels like it was about five hours ago. Or maybe five days at the most.
I sometimes will wryly say that God gives us kids so we’re sure to remember that we’re growing older too. And now technology has joined in on the conspiracy, it seems, with gadgets and devices eagerly jumping from one platform or format to the next, leaving all but the most vigorous early adopters in the dust of historical anachroniscity. (Which isn’t even a word, but should be. After all, blog and cryonaut and green fuel and auto-complete weren’t words when I was growing up either.)
So even though I haven’t played a tape in my car’s fully functional cassette player for quite some time now, as an example to all that we don’t have to grab on to the very latest and the very greatest the very second it arrives on the scene, I’m going to make a special effort tonight to pop one in and enjoy a nice hit of magnetic hiss.
Recent Comments