It was just one of those mornings: someone had a minor accident so traffic was backed up in town, making me run a few minutes late, my youngest son was stuck on "repeat" mode and just would NOT stop talking, the minivan in front of me was managing to slow down while going downhill without touching his brakes, and then some a-hole with out-of-state plates cut me off and proceeded to go 25 mph. Normally I'm pretty unflappable in the mornings because I'm only semi-conscious, but today I was getting increasingly irritated.
Since my usual six radio presets were all sucking and/or stuck in commercial hell, I put on my iPod. Lately I've been getting kind of tired of my playlists so I just put it on Shuffle thinking that with over 200 artists and 800+ songs, surely it would come up with something I felt like listening to, right?
WRONG.
Why is it that in this day and age, with all this technology, they can't come up with a decent method of shuffling songs on a portable music device? They have just never been able to get this right! Remember the days of the 6 CD changer? We all thought they were so cool until you realized that:
1. The machines always pick a favorite CD and keep giving you song after song from that disk while largely ignoring the others.
2. There is a long pause as the machine clunks and whirs and changes the disks between songs.
So now we've got iPods, which are supposed to be so freaking smart and above all of that, except they're totally NOT.
Today my iPoo'd was positive that I wanted to listen to The Doors. Well, iPoo'd, you're dead wrong; you see I am neither drunk nor high at 8 in the morning, but thanks for the suggestion. I push "next" and it starts up with Pink Floyd. Ummm, did you not hear me? I said I WASN'T high. Next. Phish. Goddamn you! I haven't wanted to listen to Phish in about 10 years. How did that get on there? NEXT. Christmas music.
#*&%!@
Okay, deep breaths. It's all MY music, after all. Can't blame anyone but myself for having it on there. What bugs me is that when I skip a song by, say, The Doors, why does it give me a different song and then make the song after that another one by The goddamn motherfucking Doors?! Why?? It's like the iPoo'd gets in moods and becomes quite insistent that I should listen to a certain artist that day. One day every single song that came on was about sex; my husband started laughing and said, "Your iPod is horny today." Other days it goes from Greenday to Mozart no matter how many times I skip tracks and tell it I don't feel very Mozart-y that day. Shouldn't there be a SMART iPod shuffle function?? I mean, really!Work with me here, people!
By the time I got to the daycare I had skipped 10 songs for every 2 I let play and I was about ready to chuck the damn thing out the window just to watch it shatter. Sure, I could go home and laboriously make more playlists, but sometimes I want to be surprised! No, I don't want to listen to "White Christmas" in July, but I don't want to delete it off the iPod/iTunes either; I tried to keep it from synching the songs I don't like but there it was! If I were in charge of
Turns out, the iPoo'd got it right only four times this morning: Dancing on My Own by Robyn, Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2, A Night Like This by The Cure, and Marching Bands of Manhattan by DCFC. Turns out I was feeling a little emo this morning. Who knew? Did I know I wanted to hear those songs? No, no I did not, so there's no way I could have made a playlist with those tunes.Shuffle can be wonderful that way, when it's not causing me to drive into traffic as I fumble for the "next" button over and over and over again. It's either insisting that I play certain artists or playing random shit that I don't remember downloading at all. The other day mine played a song in French. Yeah, French. Why? I have no fucking clue.
Does your iPod ever come out with some random crap and you have no idea how it got on there? Does it have an agenda of its own? Please tell me I'm not alone.
