Who Else Made These “Mistakes”?

I am, in no way, a techie, but I sure do like gizmos.  And I have spent a lot of money on such items that are now painfully, uselessly obsolete…like a portable mini-disc player from Sony.  Mini-discs are every bit as crystal clear as CD’s, they come covered in a case that protects the disc, unlike CD’s, and again, unlike CD’s they are completely editable and re-recordable.  And they are practically indestructible.  We’ve been using Mini-discs for almost 10 years, and out the of 500 or so we have used, we have only lost two or three.

Speaking of Sony, it was Sony which came out with the Beta video tape format, and, sure, I fell for that one, too.  After all, it produced a far better picture than VHS…didn’t it?

And there’s another one!  Who plays video tape any more?   So my many video tape playback units are all sitting in the closet, and I can’t give them away.  I tried once.  I gave one to my son-in-law for a birthday present.  He sent it back.  I should have known when they started selling them for $39. 

That only accounts for recent history.  I’m not including the 8 tracks I bought, or the cassette tapes, or the cassette decks I’ve spent lots of money on.

If I thought long and hard enough, I could come up with many more devices that are laughably obsolete.  But that’s the past.  The future is closer than you think.

I’m looking at a perfectly fine, soon to be discarded, VHS player in the wonderfully beautiful Plantation style Armoire that serves as an entertainment center in my family room.  The armoire cost a lot of money a few years ago from, Ethan Allen, no less.  In addition to my surround sound system with its woofers and tweeters, it also contains (barely) my hulking 36″ Sony Wega TV set with the 4 by 3 format.  Yep, in less than a year, that set will be old technology, and the picture on it will be the new 16 by 9 format.

But that’s not all.  The new plasma, thin screen TV set that I will most certainly buy very soon, won’t look very good hanging from that expensive armoire.  In the near future, the esteemed entertainment center will be a thing of quaint remembrance, kind of like the big, boxy, wooden radio sets that sat in the living rooms of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s.

I thought of this one day not long ago as I sat in line at an e-waste pickup center.  In the back of the pick-up I borrowed, packed and stacked as tight and high as safety permitted, I was about to dump thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of computers, monitors, fax machines and copiers that once were “state-of-the-art”.

I wept.