March 31, 2009

Electronic death

My phone makes such a pleasant sound when it dies. It only ever dies when I forget to turn it off before work, so the sound always catches me off guard. I'm sitting at work, browsing Amazon.com totally working hard when I hear a choir of chimes, playing a melody that softly decrescendos. My cell phone has just died. There must be cell phone heaven -- a place where no one ever drops it, spills Cherry Coke on it, or throws it against the wall when it's alarm goes off -- or else wouldn't it die in excruciating screams of fury?

Now mp3 players... they definitely go to some kind of hell. They do not die swift and painless deaths. My first mp3 player--an ancient metal hunk bigger than my wallet--had a particularly excruciating death. It started recalling old playlists that I had deleted months ago, perhaps waxing nostalgic for its younger days. It soon descended into dementia, saying it was playing Coldplay when it was so clearly playing Andrew Lloyd's Webber's greatest hits. It wasn't much longer until a 12 hour recharge would only last 3 minutes. At that point, I had to finally pull the plug. Besides, they were making mp3 players that would actually fit into your pockets! Your pants pockets!

But now my current mp3 player, a little cute green and black plastic box no taller than my thumb, is showing signs of old age. And it looks to be heading the direction of long, drawn-out, painful death. Right now, it's insisting that I only listen to Evanescence and Death Cab. I try to play The Killers and it says oh no, you really want to listen to Origin again. Trust me. I'm not sure how much longer it will stay in its "bossy" stage before it goes into its "severely confused" stage, but I'm fairly sure there will be no choir of softly playing chimes when it finally decides to stop working.

2 comments:

Elise said...

You are hilarious.

Jill said...

It's true. You are.