Episode 68 – What a Privilege!

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Wow, does this cartoon show my age. When I was a cadet, CDs were still very much a new technology. Very, very new. If you bought new music, you didn’t get it off of iTunes or buy MP3s from Amazon. You went to the record store and bought either the vinyl album or a cassette tape. I had 3 small boxes of cassette tapes and a whole slew of vinyl albums when I was a cadet. I didn’t have enough room in my dorm room for the albums and the record player, though, so I just brought a boom box and my cassettes. And I could only listen to the cassettes in my boom box because my car did not have a radio or a cassette player!!

Sounds pretty primitive, doesn’t it? These days, I have an iPod Nano that I can wear on my wrist like a wrist watch. I’ve got a converter that will allow me to plug it into my car stereo. I can play streaming radio from any station in the world on my iPad, and I usually buy my music from iTunes or Amazon. And all these devices are so tiny, so transportable! I can only imagine what it must be like to be a cadet today with all this technology available. Tell me, Rats of the VTCC today, does the Corps even bother to restrict your use of your iPods, your iPads, your Nooks, your Kindles, etc.? Do you have to earn the privilege to listen to your music? Because these days, the device you use to play your music on might also be the same device you read your text books on! And nobody could have even conceived of that when I was a freshman at Virginia Tech. In fact, my freshman year at Virginia Tech was the first year students in engineering were required to have computers. Not all students, mind you, just the engineering students.

My, how far we’ve come. And yet these days, I still prefer to draw my comics on bristol board with a brush pen. Unless I’m on the road, and then you know I use the iPad. Because, hey, technology works!