…you’ll forget what you have, and buy more of the same. This has happened to me any number of times down the years, usually for things like small tools and electronic components. But it doesn’t have to be physical goods. Yesterday I heard a piece on our local classical station KBAQ (AKA KBACH) that I had heard before. I like the third movement. The first two are melancholy (one is an adagio, a dirge-y musical form I simply will not touch) but the third is brisk, upbeat, and borderline sprightly. I thought, “Gee, I oughta have that on my mix thumb drive.” So I went up on Amazon and bought it.
The piece is Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) with Christopher Parkening on classical guitar, backed by orchestra. The performance I bought is not on YouTube, but can be had on Amazon here. I had to buy the whole album; they don’t sell tracks individually on that one. I bought the album anyway and simply won’t play the dreary parts. The third movement really is that good. I was a little surprised I hadn’t bought it before.
I downloaded it, unpacked the .zip, and extracted the third movement, which I dragged and dropped onto my mix thumb drive. When I put the drive back in its USB port on the Durango and went off to do some errands, I searched for the piece.
And found two.
Not of the same file. I found two performances by different artists. I had bought the performance by the Venezuela Symphony back in mid-May of this year. I stopped being surprised that I hadn’t bought it before, because I did.
Ok. Why didn’t I remember that I already had it? Just this: I have 584 tracks on that drive. With that many tracks (and in truth I don’t do a lot of driving) playing tracks randomly gives rise to statistical artifacts. it’s a virtual certainty that a few won’t come up very often. This one was at the far end of that curve: I bought it five months ago and it’s not come up even once since then.
Wotthehell; they’re both good, and now, with two performances in the mix, I may hear at least one of them semiregularly. That curve has an opposite end: I hear the Small Faces’ song “Itchycoo Park” it seems like every other day. (It’s from 1967, when my musical tastes were a lot less discriminating.) Once a month would be plenty.
The lesson here is that we live in The Age of Stuff. The first commandment in the Age of Stuff is Know Your Stuff. If you don’t know your stuff, you will almost certainly buy duplicate stuff.
One way to do this is to keep your stuff in some sort of order. I do that with books by having category areas on my bookshelves: History, Math, Science, Astronomy, Biography, SFF, and on down to things like Model Railroads and Global Warming. Every time I pull a book down, if I have a few moments to spare I scan the category. That keeps me from buying duplicate books.
Usually.
It also triggers memories of books that might be useful in whatever line of research I’m pursuing at the time.
Part of this is, of course, to keep your stuff put away in its usual places. I bought a second small ratchet screwdriver set once because the original one was tossed under a pile of odd lots on my workbench and not seen for literally several years.
I try to keep my workbench clear these days.
Know your stuff. Review it now and then. Keep it in order. You think that’s easy? Try it sometime!
