The Dark Side of Nostalgia

At work, we listen to NPR on a "boom box" radio that likely appeared in a K-Mart sale flyer in 1982 with starbursted pitches like "AM/FM/cassette" and "convenient compact size" (translation: bass-less 3" twofers---not much boom in this particular boombox). It works fine for the limited sonic frequencies produced by Noah Adams and Ira Flato, so we never give the machine much thought beyond the functionality of the "on" button.

Today Blair decided we should utilize the cassette feature, especially since there was a cassette already in the player: Fragile, by Yes. (While I'm fairly sure it was inserted by one of our prog-rock -loving coworkers, it seemed entirely appropriate that this archaic machine would feature a circa-1972 album behind its clunky mechanical door, and I prefer to think it had never housed another cassette.)

As it started, we talked about an article I had seen in which a woman talked about giving a walkman to her iPod-steeped teenage son, who inquired about the device incredulously: How do you switch to the next song? How do you access the other albums in the machine? ("It plays only ONE album? Wait, it plays only half the album? What do you mean, 'flip it over'?") We laughed about how dated cassette technology had become despite all of us growing up when tapes were the pinnacle of convenience.

We reveled in the strains of "Roundabout", "Long Distance Runaround", and all of the other titles that never made any mixed tapes of my youth. A short time later, Blair noted that the music had stopped, but there was still lots of tape left on the cassette. Immediately, we began troubleshooting the issue---"the battery light is on, that might be a factor", so we assumed it had been unplugged, but investigation revealed that the cord was still firmly planted in the socket. We spent a full minute pondering what could possibly be wrong, as mystified as cavemen trying to troubleshoot a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner.

Finally, Blair pushed eject, and as he removed the tape, a long magnetic fettuccini appeared, dangling between the cassette and the player. The player had "eaten" the tape. This would have been bad news 20 years prior, but today, we delighted in the disaster: The frustrations of tapes being dragged to their death by dirty capstan pins was a concept that had escaped our collective memory. As Blair stuck a pencil into the cassette cog to recoil the cassette, our retro cassette flashback was complete.