I am ancient

When I was a freshman in college, ATM's were the new thing. I did not for the life of me understand why old people didn't like them. They said they were impersonal and weird. I thought they were neat-- I could do my banking without leaving the campus, even on a Saturday when banks were closed (yes Virginia, banks used to be closed on Saturdays, they don't call them "banker's hours" for nothing), and I didn't have to skip class to go to the bank. When I was a kid I never got to the bank myself, unless I finished my homework early before the bank closed. So I thought the ATM was a much-needed improvement.

Fast-forward to the invention of the self-checkout line. I'm standing there and it keeps yelling at me to place the item in the bag even though I've already done so, and it won't continue letting me check out until I do, so I put an extra item of the same type in the bag and now it says there's an unrecognized item in the bagging area. I have to wait for the attendant to come back to her post in order to get the issue resolved, only to have it happen again with the next item. I sit there fuming, wishing I'd gotten in the three-deep line with the actual cashier, because the person I would have been behind is already on her way out the door.

Oddly enough, I find self-checkout lines impersonal and weird.

Me likey this new MP3 thing though. FH got me an MP3 player for Christmas, and it's just the best thing since sliced bread! I'm a big fan of They Might Be Giants, but I kinda stopped buying music when I was a starving married student, so I'm missing a good many of their albums. (Somehow when I was a starving single student, there was always a bit of money in the budget for music.) Now that I'm no longer starving and a student, and I can afford a bit of music, I had gotten out of the habit of buying, especially because there's nothing that a pack of four impulsive kids likes less than standing around a music store while Mom examines every CD.

So I discovered that I can download entire TMBG albums from the intertubes. And today I downloaded my very first album! It was cheaper and less scratchable than a CD (the kids love nothing better than to find Mom's favorite music CD's and fight over them till they get scratched).

Still, though, I can't for the life of me figure out iTunes. It always tries to boss me around and do everything its way. So I'm still ancient.