That's What It's Called

“Have you ever seen one of these?”

Alan, a company honcho on the verge of retirement, is walking toward my desk from his office. His question isn’t phrased in a Hey,-check-it-out,-I’m-showing-you-something-cool! sort of way, but in a What-the-heck-IS-this-thing? sort of way. He holds in his hand one of those old-school, 5.25-inch square black computer disks. My eyes almost bug out of my head.

It’s a floppy.

I first came into contact with those disks when my parents bought their first computer, a Tandy from Radio Shack. It had amber characters instead of green, which was super-duper cool at the time and I reveled in my 7-year-old hipness every time I laid eyes on that nifty blinking cursor. We had a typing tutor program installed on it, and my mother tried in vain to teach me some very fundamental DOS. Alas, I wasn’t interested. (You can see where that’s gotten me.) I knew only enough to get around in a very basic way, and it wasn’t more than a few years until that clunky platform was replaced with user-friendly windows, that new fangled revolution in computers that we take for granted today.

I digress.

When Alan proffers that disk, I really think he’s joking. “Oh, a floppy.” I say, waiting for some kind of joke or retro reference. Nothing. He waves it back and forth, testing out my assertion, and says, “Yes, it’s floppy, but what is it?” I smile, and realize that Alan is of a completely different era. Technologically, he completely skipped the petulant and awkard teen stages, and zipped right into the-world-is-my-oyster young adulthood, computer-wise. When I was learning about floppy disks and how to operate a “word processing machine”, Alan was still dictating to a stenographer who knew shorthand. His secretary took care of every word of correspondence that passed into and out of his office. They probably had a typing pool. Weird.

He hands it to me, and I read the sticker on the bottom of it.
“Alan, it’s a marketing campaign. See the web address on the sticker? They want you to go to their website. Probably a P.R. firm or something.” I hand it back to him.
“Okay, but what is it?” he asks, brow furrowed. Now he’s serious.
“Oh, uh…, it’s a floppy disk, a really old one.”

No recognition. I try again.

“You know those 3.5 disks? For the computer? This disk is a precursor to that.”

Crickets.

“Okay, the floppy did for very old computers what a CD or flash drive does now.” Probably not a technically correct metaphor, but that’s of little consequence. I’m at the point where I’d really like for him to go back to delegating from behind his desk instead of querying in front of mine.

Frowning, he manages a dubious “Oh.” I suddenly wonder if he knows what a flash drive is, but he seems to be at least a little satisfied with my answer and starts to walk away.

He suddenly turns back and says, again, “But what is it called?”

Oy. Retire already, Alan.