Ode to a Discman
Flash back with me to November 1998*. I was a junior in college, but I was actually living in Lexington, Kentucky on co-op. For the first time in my college career I had a car. This would come in handy when I needed to drive from Ohio back to fabulous North Dakota, but what about the tunes? MP3s had caught on among the most wired people, but MP3 players were mostly imaginary. The 1985 Honda Accord that I was driving had a tape deck, but that wouldn't help with the huge pile of CDs that I already possessed. Clearly, I needed a CD player for the car.
My parents came through by getting me a Sony Discman for my birthday. Most importantly, it had an adapter that could be used to plug the Discman into the cassette player on my car. Now I could listen to CDs or cassettes as I drove the approximately 19 hours from Cleveland, Ohio to Thompson, North Dakota.
After I started my current job in 2002, the Discman migrated to my desk, where I used it to listen to a vast amount of CDs over the years. I eventually got an iPod so I could have most of my music on my desk, but pragmatically speaking I mostly used it for MP3s of my radio show and continued to bring in CDs for my listening pleasure. In particular new CDs came in so that I had them close at hand to play without needing to remember that I had new stuff on the iPod. In the early part of my tenure there coworkers frequently would bring in their own new CDs and we'd swap around, but that mostly ended by 2008 or so. Occasionally I took it home for use on road trips, as my subsequent automobiles (briefly, a 1995 Honda Accord and longer, a 2000 Honda Accord) had only tape decks. In this manner 10 years passed.
Finally, in 2012 the once reliable Discman died. I like to think that it died at the same time as my 2000 Accord did, because the replacement car (a 2010 Honda Civic) was the first of my cars to have a CD player. The original purpose of extending my available road trip music options had finally been made moot. Most of the cassettes that came with me on road trips have also long since been acquired as CDs.
Inertia being what it is, it was only recently that I brought the Discman home and placed it in the recycle pile. I don't really need a replacement. My iPod may no longer be big enough to hold all of my music, but it can hold a nice chunk of it. If I really need a CD player my workstation at work still has one, although I've not used it in many years. Despite this lack of a need, I think I may go look for a new (to me) Discman. They're so cheap that it it's probably worth it to me to find one and keep my past alive that much longer.
And so it goes.
*Or maybe it wasn't. Certainly, it was a November when I was in college in either 1998 or 1999, as I didn't have a car at school before then and I know I got it before 2000.
My parents came through by getting me a Sony Discman for my birthday. Most importantly, it had an adapter that could be used to plug the Discman into the cassette player on my car. Now I could listen to CDs or cassettes as I drove the approximately 19 hours from Cleveland, Ohio to Thompson, North Dakota.
After I started my current job in 2002, the Discman migrated to my desk, where I used it to listen to a vast amount of CDs over the years. I eventually got an iPod so I could have most of my music on my desk, but pragmatically speaking I mostly used it for MP3s of my radio show and continued to bring in CDs for my listening pleasure. In particular new CDs came in so that I had them close at hand to play without needing to remember that I had new stuff on the iPod. In the early part of my tenure there coworkers frequently would bring in their own new CDs and we'd swap around, but that mostly ended by 2008 or so. Occasionally I took it home for use on road trips, as my subsequent automobiles (briefly, a 1995 Honda Accord and longer, a 2000 Honda Accord) had only tape decks. In this manner 10 years passed.
Finally, in 2012 the once reliable Discman died. I like to think that it died at the same time as my 2000 Accord did, because the replacement car (a 2010 Honda Civic) was the first of my cars to have a CD player. The original purpose of extending my available road trip music options had finally been made moot. Most of the cassettes that came with me on road trips have also long since been acquired as CDs.
Inertia being what it is, it was only recently that I brought the Discman home and placed it in the recycle pile. I don't really need a replacement. My iPod may no longer be big enough to hold all of my music, but it can hold a nice chunk of it. If I really need a CD player my workstation at work still has one, although I've not used it in many years. Despite this lack of a need, I think I may go look for a new (to me) Discman. They're so cheap that it it's probably worth it to me to find one and keep my past alive that much longer.
And so it goes.
*Or maybe it wasn't. Certainly, it was a November when I was in college in either 1998 or 1999, as I didn't have a car at school before then and I know I got it before 2000.