Raves

Posted on 4 Mar 2008 at 14:55

 

Gallery

Experience has taught Mel Croucher to be wary of geeks bearing gifts.

Dearly beloved, the next reading is taken from the Book Of The Bleeding Obvious, Chapter One, Verse One, wherein it is written, "Beware of geeks bearing gifts".

The specific geek bearing gifts works at PC World, and in a moment of weakness, while I wend my way through his store in search of some wireless routing toys, I accept his offer of a free all-in-one Lexmark X2480 printer-scanner-copier-bumwiper, on condition that I spend over a hundred quid right here, right now. No strings attached, or to be more precise no USB cable attached, but hey nonny no, how can I possibly lose? A free printer is a free printer, and I can always give it to a relative, or a young offender, or an economic migrant, which in my case are usually one and the same person.

But of course, I soon learn that nothing is free, and I have to part with £17.99 for an ink cartridge to test that this free Lexmark actually works. It works. Unfortunately, my greed and gullibility have blinkered me to the fact that in order for the machine to print a document in black and white, it mixes three little reservoirs of cyan, magenta and yellow ink together in a muddy approximation of monochrome. There is no black ink cartridge.

After I print out a few chapters of my latest unpublishable novel, an angry little window pops up on my monitor and in no uncertain terms orders me to buy another ink cartridge. I discover that I can't refill the cartridge myself or buy a cheap clone, and that the exclusive stockist of compatibles for this machine is none other than - that's right, folks - PC World. I have been taken in by the oldest trick in the book.

Firing on all cylinders

The original version of this scam was perpetrated by Thomas Edison over a hundred years ago. After going bankrupt, his company contrived to give away talking-machines to consumers who were hungry for entertainment technology, and then charge them 35 cents for every four minutes of recordings stored on fragile wax cylinders. They made a fortune.

I inherited several hundred of these phonograph recordings, and spent decades trying to protect the cylinders against mildew, frost, heat and fumble-fingered humans. I can tell you that boxes of Edison cylinders take up an enormous amount of storage space, but not as much as my collection of 78s from the 1920s to the late 1950s. These 10in hard discs are made of shellac and can store around three minutes of audio recording per side, and several hundred of the brittle buggers need a reinforced floor to hold them and a fork-lift truck to shift them.

Then there are my 12in vinyl discs, in their evocative 20th-century covers, racked on groaning, sagging shelves. They spin sedately at 33 revolutions per minute and store up to 30 minutes of sound per side. As for my crates of open- reel tape and cassettes, and the thousands of hours of audio data stored on CDs amassed since 1984, a pox on them all. I have decided to declutter another part of my life and rid myself of the time, space, energy, guilt and stress involved in looking after my old recordings, and yet keep them all. Hooray for the digital revolution!

Musical shares

I batch up my collections and shove them on eBay. I find that some are worth good money to an avid collector, whereas others are common as muck. Those I can't sell, I pass on to my chum Iggy The Blob, for disposal at the car boot. Before I bundle up a batch, I transfer the recordings to digital format using a variable bit-rate (where quiet stuff takes up less memory than loud stuff) then bang them on to an MP3 player. My 80GB iPod is feather-light and can hold my entire collection.