When I attended Bridgetown Junior High School* in 1990 [the days when Mark Wahlberg was a rapper, Arnold Schwarzenegger was an actor, and Will Smith . . . was both], I had no girlfriend which meant I had a little discretionary money to spend. I decided to go the Radio Shack in the shopping plaza at Glenway Avenue and Bridgetown Road [remember, this was also before the days of Best Buy or even internet purchasing so RS and KMart dominated the westside] in order to move to the cutting edge of technology: a handheld, two-inch color television. My main motivation was so I could watch those first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament during study hall.** I ended up using it during other classes without ever getting caught.
I've held onto to that little TV since then. It came in rather handy, especially for watching sporting events before the days you could check the scores out on your cellphone. If I knew I had to be out and about and wanted to see how a game was going, I'd slip the little TV in my pocket, carrying the piece of mind that I was still connected.
Sure, I don't use the TV much anymore; I keep it in a drawer upstairs. But I used it again during the windstorm. As I mentioned in an earlier post, our cable/internet was out on Sunday afternoon and I wanted to keep up with how bad the Bengals were getting killed. While watching that afternoon on my little 2" screen, one of those commercials about the HD switch in February 2009 came on. In the midst of my viewing I came to a sad realization:
In about five months, my little TV will be a plastic brick.
Even though it still works perfectly well almost twenty years after it was manufactured, it will be useless after the Super Bowl. I know this makes me seem old, but it's kinda depressing. That TV was a link to my teen years. And unlike some letterman jacket, I had a pragmatic reason for keeping it around.
So I guess I'll keep it until February and then see if there's any practical use for it then [like the government was just kidding about this whole switchover thing]. Otherwise it'll either be thrown into Kaelyn's old technology toy-pile or will end up in Mount Rumpke.
Someone reassure me that change is good.
* Bridgetown Junior High School is now known as Bridgetown Middle School. Still wondering what the big deal was about changing that name. I think that a school holding 6th through
** I was thinking about all that study hall I had from 7th through 12th grades. For the most part, it guarenteed that I would never take any books home with me because I could get my homework finished during that period. In retrospect, I suspect I would be much smarter today had not my school district given me government allotted education time so I could not have to think about school at night.