So I found myself in a Best Buy store yesterday. Haven’t really been in a big box electronics store for a couple of years—I bought my latest computer online and my wireless router at RadioShack. I was immediately confronted with a curious countertop of I-pods, the pang of desire, the realization of insufficient funds:
After ogling around for several minutes, touching several plastic enstrapped I-pods, my son and I make it back to the computer section. Lots of computers displayed on every isle but no Kingston gigabyte-PC 2700-184 pin-DDR-DIMM-333 speed-RAM (terminology spoonfed to me by techy brother-in-law) to be found. An associate guides us to a locked case with large chicken wire where he unlocks and quickly finds the $160 tiny “stick” of RAM. The clerk walks the delicate and potentially stolen RAM up to the checkout.
I look around a bit without any specific objective while son checks out latest album from the All-American Rejects, "Move Along," and the myriad of computer games like "Halo: Combat Evolved" (which son has been trying to convince me really shouldn't be rated M) and "World of Warcraft"--both the raison d'etre for gigabytes of RAM.
As we were leaving a girl or woman (I was so stunned by her words I never saw her face) just entering the store announces, “I love the smell of electronics.” Had I heard her correctly? As we walk to the car, I suggest to my son that the girl may have been making an ironic reference to Colonel Kilgore’s famous line in Apocalypse Now.
Son quickly disabuses me of this notion: “I doubt it; she was a teenager dad.” If so then her words perfectly crystallized the gulf which had creeped up between me and technology, and me and the next generations. They race ahead leaving me, but not completely; I feed off and around the frenzy, I look in, I want to be part of the new wave, the Way. Not finding traction whilst also dependent, I build up courage for annual forages into the unknown.
2 comments:
Great story. Maybe if she'd added
" . . . in the morning," it would have been secret code. It's interesting, though--if she was also a film geek (sometimes tech geeks are also film geeks), she might have been making the connection. The reference could also have easily been separated from its source.
I hate the smell of technology, but I loooooove the technology.
I think she also needed to say, "It smells like victory."
Or better: "It smells like debt."
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