I got my first CD player and my first CD in 1996 when I was living with my sister. I joined a popular record club and got the usual deal: 10 free CD’s, but I had to buy 6 more CD’s at full price over the course of the next 3 years. These record clubs were popular while I was growing up; I don’t know if they’re still around.
The standard deal is you get a certain number of records, cassettes, CD’s free (usually 10-12) but you’re obligated to buy a certain amount (usually 4-7) at full price in the next 2-3 years. The catch was that the “full price” was usually way over the price you could get them at stores. Weirdly enough, even though I saw the ads for these record clubs in magazines all the time, and every few years I would get sucked into joining one, I don’t really know if they were good deals even though you got all those free CD’s. Anyways, that’s how I started my CD collection.
I think my first CD was a Gloria Estephan Greatest Hits CD. And over the years I bought many more CD’s, in fact by 2016 I had about 275 CD’s. When I moved into the board and care home in 2016 my sister told me about this device that I could download all my CD’s into and play all my music by plugging the device into my laptop. It was a small device about the size of a deck of cards. She offered to use her computer to put all my CD’s on this device. Each CD took about twenty minutes to enter.
So I bought 5 boxes of my CD’s over and it took her a month and half to put all of them on this device. As she finished each box I would take the box and bring it to the record store and sell them, but for a box of 50 CD’s I could only get an average of $15.00. She finally finished entering all my music onto this device and I had sold all my CD’s, then she showed me how to work it. I took the device home to my group home and set it on my dresser.
The next day I picked it up to use and I accidentally dropped the damn thing on the floor! I had it for one day and dropped it on the floor the first time I went to use it and it broke. I couldn’t believe it, The first thing I thought of was that my sister was going to be really pissed off at me because she spent weeks putting all my music on the thing. Then a split second later came the full realization that I had just lost $2000 worth of music by breaking that thing. I felt sick; it happened so fast I couldn’t really believe I had done it. I think it was one of the costliest mistakes I had ever made but also the stupidest. To this day, I still feel sick over it.