Of hankies and splicing

This, kids, is when I officially declare that I am old, antiquated and definitely don’t know what meatus means.

Swear on that!

Dear fellow over-forties, lend me a hanky.  I wouldn’t dare ask anyone under forty to lend me a hanky for fear that I’d have a box of tissues thrust under my nose.  While I do admit that tissues are more sanitary and do not have to be laundered and returned, handkerchiefs were pretty.  I can almost forgive Mummy for making me the chief embroiderer who had to hem, embroider, monogram and crochet laces for all the household handkerchief needs during my girlhood.  It was a part of her campaign to convert a perfectly sane tomboy daughter into a lady.  She failed.

Well, this is about a simple word called splicing.  Splicing is what we did to cassette tapes.  During my teenage, we had devices called portable cassette players.  They looked somewhat like this

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They, dear kids under forty, were devices we listened to music in.  Yes, we had devices and we inserted tapes (storage devices that housed eight to ten songs per side) that looked like this into the device.  I spent many happy hours filling in names of songs in block letters on the cover and labelled them MIX TAPE 1, MIX TAPE 2 etc.  I even had one for all Amitabh Bacchan songs.  Yes kids, that’s how I rolled.

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There were music stores that did roaring business in recording our playlist on to a cassette.  I remember we would fast forward to hunt a favorite track or rewind.  We weren’t completely antiquated you know.  We did have FF and rewind.  Sadly, in our enthusiasm fast-forwarding and rewinding the tape, we ended up making a mess like this

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But fear not.  We had a trick to combat that.  We would insert a pencil into the toothed circular holes to gently roll up the tape.  Sometimes the tape got nicked so we had to cut the un-salvageable part and splice it together with duct tape.  I tried to explain the process to my son this morning and failed.  So I went to Urban Dictionary to get the ‘proper lingo’ to explain it and found this

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And this

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Thank you Urban Dictionary for the completely unexpected education in areas I did not think I needed to be educated about.

 

P.S.  ‘Meatus’?  Gosh I feel old!