However, there were extenuating circumstances, and the iPod wound up being, in essence, free, so I took it. The first thing I noticed about it was the packaging. Very high concept, like all of Apple's products. It came in a very slick black box with the famous Apple logo on it in white. Nothing else. When you opened the box, it swung apart neatly into two halves. Nestled inside the left half were the accessories for the 'Pod; the unit itself was beneath a cardboard flap on the right. Printed on the flap was the statement "Designed by Apple in California". Sheesh...
"When you mumble under your breath like that, you sound like you're drunk," said Eric.
John, after being duly bribed and primed with a triple-cheese Sicilian pan pizza from Mario's, sat down and tried to show me how to download music with the iTunes software. He himself doesn't use iTunes; he has specially modified private-label rip-'n'-burn software which its author won't let him share with anybody. After an hour or so of fruitless toil, John came to the realization that iTunes wasn't designed by Apple in California, it was stolen from Malaysia by Vinnie's Warehouse in New Jersey.
"We'll figure it out," said Eric grimly, pulling up another chair at the computer next to John.
Time passed. I lay back cozily on the sofa and read my way through the mountain of catalogues that had been breeding prolifically for the past couple of weeks. Occasionally I'd hear a muffled oath or the sound of gnashing molars, but no music was forthcoming. At last John got wearily to his feet. He crossed the room, sank into a chair, rolled his eyes, then lapsed into sullen silence, his hand over his brow.
"Trouble?" I inquired breezily.
Evidently they had been able, after much heroic struggling, to get the software to import the tracks from an audio CD. However, beyond that point there had been no progress. They couldn't figure out, either from the supposedly "intuitive" software or from the maddeningly casual online help files, how to convert the imported tracks into mp3's and transfer them onto the iPod. I looked at the clock. It was close to midnight.
"We'll figure it out," said Eric, sounding rather hysterical.
"Go to bed," I told him. "You won't figure it out tonight."
John was still sitting there sullenly. John Tabacco is a genius at anything having to do with audio engineering. He can make a boom box cassette recording sound as if it had been tracked, mixed, and mastered at the world's most expensive facility. I still don't know how he does it. (I suspect he made a pact with Satan a long time ago and is still kind of embarrassed about it.) If John couldn't figure out how to make iTunes work, aided and abetted by a mathematically adept, empirical, obstinate semi-Teuton like Eric, then it probably couldn't be done. I realized that at this very moment, of course, there were millions of brain-addled youths hunched over computers in grubby bedrooms and dorms across the country, all over the world...busily ripping the latest audio swill from obscure band websites and gleefully transferring it to their 'Pods...youths who wouldn't know the difference between Stravinsky and Stone Temple Pilots, who'd been on Ritalin in nursery school, who subsisted on diets of styrofoam-enriched products and rarely, if ever, took a bath.
Clearly, iTunes had been written for them, not us.
