The iPod

PASADENA, CA - Back in April of this year, my family joined the 21^st century when we purchased an iPod.  We were in the Apple Store, which I started going to frequently after I purchased a Mini Mac to play with, and we noticed that our oldest son was really interested in an iPod.  Since it was right after his birthday, we thought that an iPod Mini might be a good idea, and he was quite enthusiastic about it.  Since I had just bought a Mini Mac recently, I was motivated to buy another Apple product (the Mini Mac is really cool, more on that another time).

After installing the software that came with the iPod without any issues, I ripped a few of the cds my son liked to listen to onto his laptop and started to get familiar with iTunes.  The synchronization between the iPod and iTunes was easy enough to understand, and the general layout of iTunes was pretty straightforward.  Creating playlists was easier than in Microsoft Media Player 10, which is what I used on my workstation to listen to music during my workday.  In fact, I liked iTunes so much that I installed it on my workstation and converted all my ripped music to Apple’s format!

I did have one problem with the iPod, and that was I knew nothing about how to operate it, nor was I inclined to read any of the included documentation.  My son had no problem listening to music and navigating the menus, but no matter how many times I pressed the buttons, I just couldn’t get the hang of it and could only listen to the first song in the first playlist.  Alas, I had to swallow my pride, crack open the manual, and do a little reading.  “Oh, so that’s not just buttons, but it’s a wheel and you move your finger around it to go up and down to highlight an item in the menu!”  Boy, did I feel stupid.  That wheel, however, is awesome and lot more useful than I would’ve thought, making it extremely easy to quickly navigate the menus with one hand.

As cool as the iPod was, I didn’t have a reason to acquire one for my own personal use.  I work mainly at home, I don’t travel, I don’t take public transportation that much, and I don’t go to the gym, although I should.  So as cool as the iPod was, it just wasn’t practical for me.  At least, that’s what I thought, until I took the family out one sunny Socal Saturday afternoon for a drive down the coast. 

Our cds were, as usual, in no particular order and perilously lodged between the two front seats of our minivan, jammed in tight enough to keep them from sliding around.  Finding a cd, pulling it out, and putting it back into the unorganized collection was pain, but it’s the way we always did it.  Since we hadn’t left, yet, I opened a cd from the Killers, which was inexplicably missing the cover, to put it in the cd deck and found the new Interpol cd inside instead. Searched for the Interpol case, opened it, and discovered  Green Day’s American Idiot, and that cd’s case isn’t even in the car.  In fact, I hadn’t seen it for weeks! 

It was the time to ask the children where my Killers cd was.  It turned out that my five year old son, who likes the Killers, decided to take it into the house, I guess to listen to it in his portable cd player (yes he has one, don’t ask) and didn’t bring it back.  He never brings anything back, so I wasn’t really surprised.  Oh, he’s the one that took the cd cover, as well, which turned up a few days later below his seat in that kiddie purgatory with crayons, wrappers, weird sticky things, and anything else that fell from his booster seat.  No Killers for me that day. 

While putting on a U2 cd, which I really didn’t want to listen to, I heard faintly the music of the Killers gently wafting up from the back of the minivan.  My son in the back seat was listening to it on his iPod, wasn’t he?  I knew he had it because I had loaded it for him.  Slowly but surely a plan came together in my mind.  Didn’t they have devices at the Apple store to connect an iPod to the auto’s stereo?  Why, yes, yes they did.  Couldn’t I put all of our cds on one iPod and never go through this again?

YES!  I could put all of our cds, not just the 30 or so that were floating around the van that I thought I might listen to, but all of our cds on an iPod, hook it to the fantastic sound system, and I would never have to search futilely for that particular cd I wanted to listen to, only to be let down when it couldn’t be located. 

No more opening cases to find the wrong discs, a particular peeve of mine, and have to go through 10 different cases to find the cd I wanted; they’d all be on my iPod.  No longer would I open a Green Day case and pull out the cd to find that it won’t play because my youngest son, whose favorite band is Green Day (it’s cool when he spots their music at the Guitar Center and yells out “Green Day”), decided to look at the disc while he had some unidentifiable substance all over his little hands.  I’d be able to spin the wheel, select the album, and that would be that.  I now had a good, legitimate reason to get that iPod of my eye!

This was a good enough reason for me, but I needed a better to justify the purchase to my wife, not because she’d say no, just because, well, just because.  I really wanted one now, but what solution would I want to sell the wife on?  Then it came to me:   I’ve got a bit of a weight problem, I’m nowhere near my ideal weight, and my ideal weight isn’t near what the government thinks my ideal weight should be. But, if I had an iPod, I’d probably walk more and I could use more exercise.  I could use a lot more exercise, actually, since my regimen consisted of walking to the car or the refrigerator and not much more.  This was the reasoning I was looking for!  If she balked at this, I could always bring up the unexpected delivery of boxes and boxes from the Nutrisystem people that arrived at the house one day without previous warning because she had decided to try it for a diet.  Yeah, I’ve brought that one up before, and it is an oldie, but it's a goodie; her reaction to me bringing up again would be priceless, as least to me that is. 

While somewhat skeptical about my reasoning, equating an iPod with me walking more, she didn’t protest, and a couple days later I walked into my local Apple Store, plopped down my debit card, and became the owner of a bouncing baby iPod Photo that weighed in with a storage capacity of 30 gigs! 

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By John Conrad
Mr. Conrad is a writer based in Southern California

Keywords and misspellings:  I-Pod aplle I-Tunes