Archaic

(This is the post that wouldn't publish.)

I asked an assistant at my department to dub me an audio tape that I need for one class. I gave her the original and an empty audio cassette. She looked at me with a blank face and finally said that she had no idea how to do it. So I took out the double deck cassette player, put in the original tape in the one deck and the empty tape in the second deck, pressed play for the one and record and play for the other. I asked her to please bring me the tape once it is fully recorded.

Today I used the recorded tape only to find that it is only recorded on the one side. Once the original tape was finished playing Side A, the assistant never turned it over to record Side B. That one have to actually dub both sides is something I’ve taken for granted and neglected to tell her.

This, of course, makes me feel terribly old. This girl grew up when audio cassettes have become obsolete. She has never copied a tape before. The closest she comes to anything remotely as archaic as dubbing a tape is to burn a CD. Her audio life concerns copy-and-pasting from her PC to her MP3-player and setting up playlists.

What does she know about making “Love Tapes,” a whole night’s hard work of selecting your favourite love song, chosen with much care for their (subliminal) messages and edited together on a tape that you bought from the Indian’s store? Burning a compilation of the latest pop-songs that you downloaded from the Internet just doesn’t compare.