After being surrounded by geeks and mind-boggling technologies right through the week, and with deadlines squeezing every ounce of life out of me, I was left desperately seeking a weekend. Though the weekend seemed light years away, it finally arrived, though it seemed to me it was I who rushed towards it with lightning speed!
Whatever the case was, all that matters is once Friday beckoned, I was out of the office in a jiffy. I wanted to run away from the clutches of technology and sink in the serenity of nature. But when one is so used to the maniacal demands of city life, getting away from it is a tad difficult; also nature seemed far far away.
So it struck me that the perfect thing to do would be to hang out with friends, who were free men unlike me-a faithful slave to technology. But this seemingly temporary detour from this world of technology proved to be an unforgettable and enlightening experience.
20 GB PATA + 60 GB = 80 GB SATA!
I met this friend (whose identity I dare not reveal, since I don’t want to risk personal injury), an engineering student with a tech handicap. He recently shifted his loyalty from Intel to AMD. The new PC he purchased has an AMD Athlon 64 processor while the old one had an Intel Pentium 4 processor. When I heard about it, I couldn’t resist asking him about his PC’s configuration. While he answered most of the obvious aspects like brand of the monitor and speakers, answering queries about the internal components made him a tad uneasy. The blank look on his face was discouraging; so instead of bothering him, I decided to take a look at the computer myself.
I fi gured that an 80 GB SATA hard drive was installed in his computer; so I asked him what he had done with his older 20 GB PATA hard drive. I of course had an ulterior motive here. My hard drive was brimming with data and getting a second-hand drive for a friendly price would be a blessing. But his reply left me dumbfounded. His exact words were, “The computer assembler f added 60 GB of space to the older hard drive, which resulted in a new 80 GB disk”. I concealed my laughter and explained to him calmly that a hard drive cannot be upgraded to a higher capacity; it needs to be replaced. The appreciation I received in return was equivalent to the accolades a person would receive had he managed to avert the Third World War!
Head-spinning experience
The next day, the same friend who by now regarded me his Gadget Guru, urged me to accompany him to purchase a Discman he so wanted to possess. I agreed. We checked out a reputed electronic store in our vicinity.
The sales personnel at the store were so presentable that I got an inferiority complex. Forget about being immaculately dressed, I looked like something the cat dragged in. Anyway, I inquired about the various brands of Discman available, in the most impeccable manner possible.
After browsing through a fairly large number, we narrowed down to a Panasonic Discman featuring a transparent panel and capable of reading audio CDs, MP3 CDs, and VCDs. My friend noticed something peculiar about the Discman-when the music played, the disc would rotate for a brief period and then come to a standstill even though the music continued playing. So he inquired about this rather odd feature. Before I could explain that the music was buffered in a RAM chip from where the music was played even though the disc did not rotate, the salesman’s prompt reply made my jaw drop. His masterpiece quote, “While playing the disc, initially the disc is spun and later the lens is spun and that explains why the CD is stationary after a while.” Before yours truly- crusader of technology could strike the salesman in frustration, I decided it would be wise to pay for the Discman and get out of there.
When we stepped outside the shop, a Motorola banner caught my attention. It proudly proclaimed, ‘Intelligence everywhere’. I looked at my friend next to me and thought of the tech-challenged salesman and sighed. To me, only ‘Intelligence nowhere’ seemed more apt