I had not seen one of these since my pre-wrinkle days (a looooong time ago). Eager to listen to the seminar, I was suddenly confronted by the fact that I needed some kind of apparatus to play the tape. I did an archeological dig through cupboards and boxes - somewhere between the Bronze Age section and the 80’s section I found this bright yellow thing, with fat buttons on it. I dumbly pushed at the buttons like an ape woman, making guttural animal sounds. It was a discovery of immense magnitude – I had managed to excavate the mythical Walkman.
Playing the tape was a whole new experience. There was no simple way of skipping backwards and forwards to different tracks. This was a chronological process: Listen to side A, turn the tape around, listen to side B, turn the tape around, and only then could I get back to the start of the tape. Not only did I find it all very frustrating and slow, but I also discovered a lack of small-muscle control and dexterity in my hands. I have an overdeveloped SMS-thumb, a hand palm shaped like a computer mouse, and an index finger that wants to left-click with obsessive-compulsive regularity. Retrieving and turning a cassette was positively exhausting.
I never thought I’d be one of those people who'd say stuff like: “I remember when I was young…” Well, I was wrong. I remember when I was young you couldn’t create a latest hits CD by downloading tracks off the Internet. No, you had to sit by your radio on Saturdays, listening to the top 40, your finger poised over the record button. The skill lay in pushing ‘record’ just after the DJ uttered his last word, then you had to carefully listen to the song and try to figure out when the DJ would start speaking again at the end of the song.
You’d usually end up capturing the DJ’s first few words on tape. So, you had to quickly rewind and try to pinpoint the exact moment just before the DJ spoke, in time to record the next song (the anxiety caused by such a moment, would classify this process as an adrenaline sport). By the end of this process you’d end up with a tape filled with songs that started halfway through the first verse, ended halfway through the last chorus, interspersed with half-spoken words by the DJ. It was the era of the “mix-tape”.
I remember when I was young you also couldn’t send off an email to catch up with friends and family. No, you had to write a letter. You had to contend with pens that dried up halfway through the letter, forcing you to complete the letter in different coloured ink. There was no spell check and delete button to correct spelling mistakes. The end product looked like a dog’s breakfast: 3 different shades of ink, white blotches of Tippex, and blobs of smudged ink where the pen decided to vomit onto the page.
Then you had to put up with the postal service. It took at least 2 weeks for your letter to reach your cousin in Upington, another 2 weeks for your cousin to get her act together and write a reply, and another 2 weeks for her letter to reach you. By then you’d forgotten you even had a cousin and had moved on to bigger and better things.
The world has certainly changed a lot since then. We now live in the era of instant gratification, thanks to the wonder of technology. If I send an email and don’t get a response within an hour, I start badgering the recipient with repeat emails. If someone does not answer their cell phone, I feel offended: “How dare they not answer their phone?” Technology has brought many great luxuries into our lives, like iPods, the Internet, mobile phones and email. Unfortunately we now believe that this gives us the right to intrude on each others' personal space anytime and anywhere.
Sometimes I miss the days when personal space was still respected. I remember when I was young…
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