BBC Subjects Young Child To Ridicule, Confusion For Purposes Of Revealing Shocking Fact That Walkmen Are Old

The five best realizations that 13-year-old Briton Scott Campbell came to during a week when he was forced to sport a Walkman in place of his iPod, and roundly mocked by his schoolmates: 5. “I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down ‘rewind’ and releasing it randomly–effective, if a little laboured.” And it didn’t result in the tape being eaten! Kid, if you can translate your “shuffling” into an MP3, you could probably get at least a little love from the more remix-happy music blogs out there. 4. “The warbling is probably because of the horrifically short battery life; it is nearly completely dead within three hours of firing it up. Not long after the music warbled into life, it abruptly ended.” I dunno, this sounds kind of odd to me. How long had the batteries been sitting in the Walkman before Campbell magically brought it back to life, hm? 3. “There were a number of buttons protruding from the top and sides of this device to provide functions such as ‘rewinding’ and ‘fast-forwarding’ (remember those?), which added even more bulk.” Why does something tell me that the kid’s dad wrote this sentence? Does this family not have a DVR? 2. “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.” This was the point in the story when I began to officially feel like a relic from an ancient era, one where transparent cassettes seemed somehow beamed in from the future. 1. “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.” Gets the top spot because c’mon, how many people who were around in the Walkman era probably made the same mistake? Giving up my iPod for a Walkman [BBC via scroll]