verging_on_random

Technology belongs at home

February 15, 2007 on 9:38 pm | In Uncategorized |

Some technological ‘advances’ are straight out pointless, infuriating and generally a huge step backwards. Number 1 on the list is the car CD player.

Back in the good old days you had a cassette player. A cassette would play for 45 minutes, the clever little thing would then reverse automatically and play the other side. You’d then press your thumb firmly on a big round button and eject the cassette, which could be chucked onto the back seat and replaced with another one without even taking your eyes off the road. Every few months you’d collect the cassettes and put them back into their boxes … not necessarily the right ones, but who cared? The cassettes themselves were practically bulletproof. I had a box full get totally submerged in a flood a few years back and once they dried out they were as good as ever, though the labels had gone a bit runny.

Contrast that with the in-dash CD player. CDs play for 80 minutes max. It’s hard enough to slide them into the slot even if the car is parked, impossible to do it on the move. Getting the buggers in and out of the jewel case takes two hands and even then they’re so flimsy and slippery that they’re likely to end up on the floor, where the tiniest scratch renders them unplayable. If you tried to design an audio system that was completely unsuited to a motor car, you’d come up with something like the compact disc.

Stackers of course are even worse. You have to predict in advance what you’ll feel like listening to the day after tomorrow, or alternatively risk a serious accident while trying to navigate between the tracks on 6 discs when you can’t remember what order you loaded them in. Then when it’s time to change the discs you have to sit in the car for 20 minutes enduring an interminable series of whirs, beeps and sundry other mechanical noises while the screen issues peremptory instructions (’Wait’ being the most common one), and rejects discs at random just to test your homicidal fury threshold.
The next technological breakthrough will be even worse. We’ll get cars with 200 gigabyte hard drives in the dash, and have to take a week’s annual leave while we load them up with our music collections. Then we’ll be able to experience incandescent road rage trying to find a track while we’re driving, incurring yet more panel-beating expenses by trying to make sense of a digital readout cunningly designed to be illegible from a distance of more than 10cm (three if the sun’s shining on it).

I’d get rid of the lot and replace it with a good old-fashioned cassette player but I did that with my last car. It took several attempts to find a car audio place that even stocked such an esoteric item and I think they installed it using a crowbar and a four pound hammer. Half the dash was broken and glued back in untidy pieces (he broke the window winder putting a speaker in the door too - there was so much araldite in the car I had to drive with an oxygen mask for a week).

So it looks like I might just have to start listening to the radio again … except my spiffy in-dash CD stacker struggles to pull in any stations more than two km away.

Technological progress … BAH! I say.