iPodiot

This Christmas at the Batty house found a shiny new 30GB iPod making its appearance under the tree. With my name on it! This was a gift totally out of the blue, never having expressed an interest in one previously, this was a thing that needed a commitment on my part; to fully appreciate it required a learning curve steeper than my usual gifts: socks or a sweater. So, with some trepidation, I unboxed it, charged it up (that much I could figure out), and then...

...what? Put all my CD's on it so I could listen to them ALL THE TIME? Hmmm. This might be a problem. "Just make playlists," said the older son. More choices. "ON-THE-GO" was the default playlist. A good title for a meth addict, I'll just delete it... Uh Oh. No can do. I'll just go lie down for a while.

I come back to iTunes a few days later and find that some "helpful' person loaded it up with Tom Waits songs. Oh dear. Maybe I'll make a playlist entitled "ON-A-BENDER." I try deleting it on the computer, then try pressing buttons on the iPod itself. No such luck. I get frustrated, and really started hammering on the menu wheel. Solitaire comes up. More random button pressing results in songs that play for six seconds then go to a random selection for six more seconds- and it's all Tom Waits!

Fast forward two weeks. I wipe out everything and start anew. I load up iTunes with a collection of my goofy CD's. I try to listen with those "sexy" little ear buds. Evidently they are designed for a different species of animal than human. So it's down to the musty basement to dig out my taped-up Sony MDR V600 headphones. I soon realize that some tunes are really not suitable for casual listening. Back to iTunes, delete, clear iPod, plug, unplug, something happens, little wheel icons turn on the computer screen. Suddenly a light bulb goes on in my thick cranium: I was trying to figure it out logically and only got confused. When I let it do its own thing, it worked.

Now do I really have to listen to it? I wonder what's on the radio....