Salon.com > Joel Keller

PCs killed the mix-tape star

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 20:30:00 +0000

I miss the way I used to make mixes. I'd sit in front of my tape deck, with a stack of CDs or records on one side of me, and a beverage (adult or otherwise) on the other, and spend a couple of hours or more finding just the right combination of songs to put on the tape. The levels would all match; loud songs got softened and soft songs got a boost. I would attempt to take the mix right to the end of the tape; I'd spend over an hour finding that perfect minute-and-a-half song or snippet that would fit musically with the rest of the mix.

All the while, I would be swigging the beverage, and listening to each song as if it was the first time I'd heard it, usually with head down and some appendage keeping time. After a side was done, I'd rewind, punch out the tab, put on a custom-made label, and go to bed knowing that I've made something that I or my friends were going to enjoy for years to come.

Want to stop your job from being outsourced? Join a union.

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 20:30:00 +0000

When I was a kid, my dad's pager was the least favorite item in our house. When he was on-call, my family couldn't go to dinner or a movie or Grandma's house, for fear that the contraption would go off and call him away to the office. When it did go off, and there weren't many weekends when it didn't, my dad would trudge to the phone, speak into it using loud and profane words, and then, if needed, put on his coat and shuffle off to the location of the latest emergency. Things got so bad, I seriously considered running over his beeper with my neighbor's Big Wheel.

Was Dad a doctor, volunteer fireman or paramedic? Nothing of the sort. He was in I.T., before the term "information technology" ever existed. As a mainframe technician, he would be called in at a moment's notice to replace a defective board or swap large DASD units in order to keep a customer's big iron running.