It's Neat to be Obsolete!

Everything old is cool again. I’m not talking about fashion or music but actual old crap. Everyone is obsessed with getting the newest, the latest, the most up-to-date, but personally I think obsolete stuff has its merits.

Take digital cameras for instance; more megapixels, more digital zoom, more money frankly and in the end we take the same still photos of our friends posing we would have taken with the old family Pentax. I almost never take my digital camera anywhere—that shit was expensive and I am terrified of dropping it or getting it wet or having it stolen, why the hell did I buy it? The best pictures we got from our cruise in May were from disposable cameras that we tossed back and forth, while most of our digital cameras snapped the same pictures from 19 different lenses, but boy were those pictures high quality.

Another great example is cars. I drive a 94 Toyota Tercel. When I finish a bottle of water I toss it into the backseat. If my car takes a hard hit from a speed bump or someone bangs my car when they open their door I just shrug my shoulders. I can pretty much guarantee no one will ever steal my car. Hell I could leave the keys in the ignition overnight and solid chance my Grannymobile will still be there come morning. Sadly my dear car is on its last legs and I may soon have to look into purchasing a vehicle I might actually have to care about. I’ll worry about security and keeping it clean plus my insurance will be way higher, all this for a shiner paint-job and a driver’s side window that closes properly—hardly worth it.

Cell phones are a crazy case of buyer fatigue. Each new marketing campaign makes your old phone seem like shit. Now they record video, identify music, administer insulin, perform CAT Scans, allow you to teleport and make you live forever. That’s pretty much how we react to each new generation, like we couldn’t possibly survive without the changes that have been made. In the end 99 percent of what we do on our phones (calling and text messaging) we could have done on the old Clearnet models from 1995, not to mention the fact that those clunkers could withstand being dropped from the CN Tower while today’s phones break at the drop of a dime. My previous flip phone broke because apparently the very fragile wires that run through the phone snapped when I flipped it open too hard! Sacha’s phone went on the fritz because she takes it with her into the bathroom where there was apparently “too much moisture in the air”. The Zack Morris phone seems more legit everyday.

This brings me to my computer. It’s old. Like, crazy old. Like Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” was still huge when I bought it. This is okay though. Having a crappy computer means I can open attachments from people’s e-mails, I can download music and movies and not care if they have viruses because frankly my computer is a virus hotel. I think I have so many viruses they cancel eachother out. There is no stress regarding reformatting or updating to the latest software because frankly it couldn’t handle it anyway. I just kick back and let my Celeron processor do it’s thang.