You Old, Cheap Bastard

I am getting older. I can feel it in the morning when I wake up. I can feel it when the weather changes. And I can feel it when I’m standing on my porch yelling at all the damn kids in my neighborhood.

There is no denying that the age that I feel is easily outpacing my “How long I have been on Earth” age. Speaking of age, I think I have found a way to accurately estimate a person’s age by counting the number of complaints they make per minute.

Take Andy Rooney for instance. By my calculations, Mr. Rooney is precisely 347 years young.

On the topic of complaints, one of my favorites is technology. The other day, it was pointed out to me that you cannot download a CD. It’s called an album. But I have been calling Albums “CDs” since 2002, when I finally stopped referring to “CDs” as “tapes”.

Yeah, I held onto the tape thing a little too long. It wasn’t until my car stereo had eaten all of my tapes that I finally broke down and bought a CD player. Even then, I had to use a “Cassette Adapter” in order to play anything. And somehow I still long for the days of low-fidelity and an auto-reverse function.

Video tapes were fun too. The other day my daughter was watching a DVD that had been on the receiving end of some particularly nasty childhood mistreatment. When the picture and sound started to distort, I instinctively told her to adjust the tracking.

A lot of this stuff is actually being considered “vintage” these days. So I dug out some old electronics, and I am pleased to announce that it looks like most of my Christmas shopping is done.