BLOGSERVATIONS

Maybe I’m becoming a grumpy old man (at a mere 42), but the sales-”men” in some of the stores I venture into seem to be nothing more than pimply-faced, snot nosed, wise-ass kids. Did I miss something? Whatever happened to dressing nice for work, or acting like you actually give a sh*t about your job? Hey, how about actually giving a sh*t about the customers, or thinking for two seconds before your knee-jerk reaction to a customers inquiry?

Granted the employee who was standing by the Apple Display at the local Best Buy (somewhere near Downingtown, PA) was dressed impressively, and was clean cut, but I didn’t really appreciate the smirk or chuckle when I asked if they stocked any USB ZIP drives.

Now, I know a thing or two about technology — I’ve been programming on computers, tinkering with assorted AV devices, computer peripherals and other techie nonsense for the past 30 years or so — so I understand that ZIP drives are a relative thing of the past when it comes to external, removable, portable storage devices. However, they are still necessary in some situations, and are still available online. Even the new ones are being sold at the retardedly high prices they were originally sold at in their hey-day.

If people ever stored something on a ZIP drive, isn’t it possible that there may still be some small demand for them, even now? The situation I find myself in is owning a box of ZIP disks that contain some important data for me, that I would like to transfer to a newer medium, say, my 1TB NAS drive, or maybe even burn the data to CD for long term storage. CD? HAHAHAHA!

I don’t think I needed to be met with a snide grin. Yeah, it could be I misread his reaction, and I know the ancient technology is pretty “old school” to younger people who were born into a world of USB flash drives, but that old technology created a zillion ZIP disks containing data that outlived the drives that wrote it. So I need a ZIP Drive to transfer all of my old data to a newer storage technology.

Part of me wishes the kid would have suggested an 8 gig flash drive so I could have brought him up to speed on why someone might be in the market for outdated ZIP technology. Instead I thanked him, because after the smirk he was polite enough, and I moved on down the aisle past the doofus sales-”man” with the hair hanging over his eyes, baggy pants and untucked shirt. It looked like he had just rolled out of bed, but it was 2 PM.

Shame on me. I was a young kid myself once, I shouldn’t expect so much from the younger guys these days, they’ll find their way and do their thing just like everyone else. One day these kids will be looking for a USB adapter to transfer all of their backed up music, movies, and gaming data onto Holographic Storage, or a Molecular Memory Device or something. And so will I.