Tag: Automobile

Repo and Retro

We don’t want the former, and wish to collect the latter.

In our age of mass production, supplysiders push consumption to the  point of writing up bad loans, hence Repo.

Then, and this happened to me once, products came out of the assembly line all look alike: I once mistakenly opened an identical rental car (Taurus) and it even started until I found out my laptop wasn’t in the back seat.  Now, we want Retro because of its obvious scarcity.

On weekend, we see different lifestyles at play: Harley fans, sport cyclists, families on outing, baseball league and of course, retro car owners, parking their souped-up automobiles in Main Street Old Town. Onlookers must have felt a mix of envy and admiration. Nothing feels better than a waxed-up oldie.

In contrast, miles and miles of repo cars are found next to “salvaged” cars in our industrial wasteland. Repo men branded them with chalk. Same steel. But the retros are well-kept while the repos are sold for parts.

What a difference in attitude and emotional investment.

This unchecked attitude can get carried over to how we treat people.

When we love someone or think positively about that person, we treat them (even if they are old or have passed their useful phase) as “retro”.  In contrast, when we found no utility value out of them, they are essentially, in our eyes, repos.

Their values are now up to the bean counters to decide. Fair market value for repo and increased value over time for retro.

We need to retrain and keep that child-like innocence, to look at life anew. To see people’s value and worth. In the age of mass production, we push consumption and adoption (I-phone 5 and new markets like China). But have we developed the ability to tell the difference between people and product? (to make things worse, career coaches often recommend us to “package” ourselves and “reinvent” ourselves, just as they had once failed with the New Coke. Or that discarding habit has spilled over to the inner sanctum of our hearts? The way McNamara used to crunch the numbers during the Vietnam War (ROI means how many casualties on each side etc..).

I will never forget the characters in “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro. They were “created” to serve as industrial organ donors (Repo) to preserve Retro (rich people who can afford surgery to replace their failed organs). While waiting to “donate” their body parts, the main character, Ruth, asked “Why did you collect our art works then”. “Just to see you got soul at all” replied the Principal.  There is a line to be crossed over from Retro to Repo. Then the issue looms larger than just a misspell. It’s a cancer growing undetected in our post-industrial society on steroid.

Rev tone

Public concerns for traffic safety create a new market for rev tones used in electric vehicles.

People fear they cannot hear those noiseless cars approaching. So with multiple “ring tones” currently in the works,

pedestrians might get more than what they were bargaining for: out-of-sync responses to false stimuli (young men get a kick  souping up their Civics with fast-approaching Ferrari sound).

Similar chaos were experienced in the streets of New York before the DoT came up with the Red-Green-Yellow convention.

A friend of mine got hit from behind while walking in Dalat with MP3 on. The motorbike that hit him was

going down hill with engine off (apparently during the months of high fuel prices) with rider  facing down to avoid heavy rain . Hear no evil, see no evil.

With each invention comes a cluster of ancillary products: PBX + voicemail and headsets, wire line phones + answering machines, and now electric vehicles create a need for revving tones.

Just like those Ford automobiles (as long as it’s black!) in the old days, electric vehicles will clutter our nation ‘s highways,and personal “rev tone” will deceive our ability to I.D. them (our audio memory bank hasn’t yet been updated, except for a meager sound effect collection, e.g. electric luggage carts operated inside the airports or the fast beeping of backing-up trucks.) Cars will be manufactured Just-in-time like Dell. And with voltage (or storage capacity) options just like our choices of CPU. Would you like to pick out your rev tone to go with it?  Gas station will be changed to car station, and won’t take up all the precious real estate

(there is no need for a large driveway to accommodate fuel trucks).   Soon, charging stations will be cheap enough like treadmills to be installed in one’s garage. Garages will really be crowded: it gets in-sourced as home gym, hot water tank storage, home office,

garage band studio and vehicle charging station. Apartment and condo managers will be busy assigning

charging spots. So are corporations with assigned “employee of the month” space. Obnoxious salesmen won’t be able to hide their “rev tone” as easily as they did their tattoos.

Best way for rev tone to serve electric vehicle drivers is to give them an option to turn it on or off. That way, a party goer can sneak back into the neighborhood at night, undetected. That would be quite eerie even to the by-then drunk driver himself.

He might all of a sudden hear not just the rev tone, but a prerecorded ” raise your hands up to where I can see them!”. At least, this can prevent a possible screeching sound then complete silence preceded by that awful wham (of an automobile at impact). All is quiet on the western front. That is, until the next rev tone cruises by. In South LA, a drive-by is nothing but quiet.