When Cool Becomes Uncool

There is a corollary that says, “If you wait long enough anything will be out-of-date.” (I’m not sure why I put this in quotation marks because I just made it up.) This little bit of wisdom has kept me from purchasing many frivolous, albeit desirable, things. In other words, if I want something really bad I just wait a while and it will pass.

I have been into digital music for many years now. Way back in the mid-90s when Winamp was still privately held by its seventeen year old inventor, Justin Frankel, I downloaded a free copy of his player, paid $25 to download a wav ripper and started furiously sharing mp3 music files with friends. A co-worker and I rigged a campus network between buildings using old telephone wire and bits of Cat-5 twisted-pair whenever we could find it. A whole new world of networking, shared music files, and email was opened to us. It was heady stuff because we were discovering and applying as we went along. After we learned about IP addresses we hacked (yes I did use that word and yes I did) into the company main-frame which enabled us to connect it to anyone with a PC—including our bosses—saving them a boatload of money and bypassing the vendor. But I digress.

When the geniuses at Apple jumped on the digital music bandwagon with iEverything, my son had to have an iPod. I thought it was an extravagance and said so. Cool, but a pricey bit of entertainment nonetheless. He bought one with his own money—10 gigabytes, $389; American.

When he showed me how, with a $39 FM attachment and a bit of Velcro stuck to the dash of his car, it could replace his AM/FM CD player I was star struck. I had to have one. Unfortunately wanting and getting were two different things. I couldn’t afford one so I waited. And I waited. I was missing cool and not very happy about it. A couple of years went by and my company upgraded my trusty old, indispensable PDM. My new Palm TX played mp3s, videos, kept my calendar, surfed the Internet, displayed my emails and had a memory card slot for all my favorite tunes. It wasn’t iPod cool but it was a utilitarian dream.

Last week I was browsing at Costco and stopped dead in front of a massive pallet of iPods in blister packs. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Sixpack who live in a single-wide down on Tide Flats Drive were picking up a couple of iPod Nanos for Christmas stocking stuffers. In that instant I realized I did not want an iPod. Any iPod. Ever. iPods were no longer cool. For a person who routinely goes from uncool to almost cool and back to uncool in the same 8 hour workday, it was a revelation. I had waited long enough and I was triumphant!