My laptop computer, no stranger to passive-aggressive behavior, has eaten iTunes. Consumed it, digested it, and excreted it out into the ether, where all five hundred of my songs are beyond human reach. I must have iTunes on my computer because those songs go immediately onto my iPod. This, of course, involves synching my iPod to iTunes which, small mercies, is one of those rare, easy-to-perform computer tasks. I cannot think of synching anything without bringing to mind my late friend Madeline who coached a synchronized swimming team called the Synchers. Or maybe it was really supposed to be the Sinkers. I never knew but thought it was the cleverest thing ever. The team was made up of 10 80-year-old women who were fabulous. They put on shows at a local pool, the damp version of a dance recital. Gosh, I miss Madeline. In case you are wondering, my phone would not play a song if I begged it. Which, having some standards albeit pretty low, I will not do. The closest my phone comes to music is a variety of ring tones, all equally annoying. I am inordinately grateful when the phone deigns to receive a call. I cannot expect it to provide “Snoop Dogg’s Greatest Hits” as well.
Doing a workout at the Y without music is too horrible to contemplate. Steve got iTunes back on my computer and I went about re-loading all those songs. I did this the old fashioned way, by inserting CDs into my computer and downloading the songs. This is akin to striking flint to make fire but, just like striking flint to make fire, it works. Eventually.
Some of my savvier friends (and all my friends are lots more savvy than I) have asked why I don’t store my music in the Cloud. Believe it or not, this occurred to me. I had a couple of songs in the Cloud which raises more questions than it answers. The first question is, how did just a few songs out of my hundreds get into the Cloud? I didn’t put them there deliberately; they just ended up there. And why do we have to capitalize that word because it certainly is not capital letter-worthy.
Why am I dissing the Cloud? Or should I say, in protest, the cloud?
The computer gurus would have us believe wholeheartedly in the Cloud. “Put your stuff in the Cloud” they say. “It’s great.” “It frees up storage” (or something). “Your stuff is right there when you need to retrieve it.” Those of us of a certain age will remember these very same people telling us this very same story about the floppy disk. We started with a floppy disk that actually flopped. Then there was the rigid floppy disk. Right then, right when there was such a thing as a rigid floppy disk, we should have known ever more far-fetched lies would pour down upon our gullible ears. The floppy (or not) disk was succeeded by the Zip drive. The Zip drive was in turn rendered obsolete by the CD and the thumb drive.
In our basement sits an ancient, revered computer that still has a Zip drive in it. The computer is heftier than my bicycle, supports a monitor that takes up more than one cubic foot of space, and has a mouse attached by a cord. It makes a comforting humming noise when it is running. This dinosaur is the only computer in the house that has never crashed. Or eaten iTunes, by the way. I am usually not prescient at all, especially not in the field of computer technology, but I saw this one coming. I have an ungodly number of word documents on Zip drives and I wanted to be able to access them.
But back to the infamous Cloud. As mentioned, I had a few songs there, mysteriously hovering just out of sight. I wanted to burn a CD that included one of those songs. Yes, I still have a CD player. It is in my 14-year-old car. Anyone surprised so far? When I went to put the song on the burn list, the most (un)amazing thing happened. A very terse message from somewhere said I could not put that particular song on the CD. And why? And why, you might ask, was I forbidden from putting that song on the CD? Because (and oh, how I wish I could get away with putting this next part all in CAPITAL LETTERS) because the song was in the Cloud!
The defense rests.
