Flashing Past

I don’t mean to sound like an old fuddy-duddy here (and yet I just used the term “fuddy-duddy”) but I feel like the pace of technology is getting away from me a bit. Not in the sense that I’m scared or concerned about recent advances, just that I sometimes wonder if we really NEED them.

As an example, I went to the store the other day to buy a flash drive. These are devices that even 5 years ago cost like a thousand dollars and a toe, and you got like 2MB storage space. Nowadays, they come withwhat seems like a gajillion terabytes and in every conceivable casing geeks ever dreamed.

The problem is that sometimes I don’t want a super-awesome thing with several coolio-mod-daddy bells and whistles. Sometimes I want a cheap piece of shit to get the job done.

Which brings me back to me, at a supermarket, trying to buy a cheap-ass flash drive so I can transfer a few files. Like, a video and some word documents. Absolutely nothing fancy. Admittedly, it’s way, WAY more than I would have been able to fit on a floppy disk, but still. I needed, like, a gig at the MOST.

The smallest sized drive the supermarket had was 2 gig, and it cost 30 dollars. Now, again, that’s not a crazy price. But it’s far above what I wanted to pay. Of course, my ideal price would have been “free”, but we live, as my counselor keeps telling me, in a society that has rules, so I get there will be a charge for items. But this is a situation I’m looking to get out of for like, 5 bucks, tops. Instead, I’m

buying what ends up being a reasonably major purchase, for something I’ll likely lose in a month because these things are small and I’m messy.

Basically what I’m getting at here is developers are making me peronally uncomfortable and I need them to stop doing that immediately. Thanks guys, I appreciate it.