iTunes Late Bloomer

It's me... the late bloomer... and for this new cool sharing technology, I was one of the last in our office on the bandwagon. For months, my cooler, more hip colleagues had been freely sharing their iTunes library... burning CDs for each other... uploading each other's CDs and jammin' to some cool tunes... all unbeknownst to moi.

Yes, it was a bittersweet day when I asked one of my colleagues to send me this way cool Beastie Boys/Beatles mix (yes, it is pretty cool by any standard), and he came in to set my iTunes up for sharing... wow! A whole new world opened in an instant. I was connected to all my colleagues libraries... and they could see my library as well. You would have thought I had smelled a rose for the first time.

Then I was talking with another colleague, and she said, "Yeah, we've been sharing music for many months now... since {NAME DELETED - a former colleague who no longer works here} was here." That was in March... and it's August. I had been missing out... all this long while, music was flowing freely all around me, and I had no idea. I was the last one to know.

While I lamented and licked old wounds of being the last kid in the class to be in on the latest news (yes, this was familiar and uncomfortable territory for me), my colleague said something else that just lifted my spirits... "But Michelle, since you started using iTunes, it's kind of given it a new life..."

I guess that's a nice way for her to say... "Yes, we enjoy your old geezer music too."

What's so cool about sharing our iTunes libraries is you get to see even more into the personalities of your colleagues. Like me, for example... I have some of that fun mixed music of the other colleague, some Nine Inch Nails, an Alien Ant Farm tune, a little Beastie Boys, some Jimmy Buffett, some Enya, some of my favorite Broadway hits, a lot of Chopin & Lizst and, of course, a huge collection of Frank and the Rat Pack. Something for every mood... and everyone else gets to listen in as well. In fact, I smile every time I shut down my computer at night, and I get the error message saying that someone else is connected to my iTunes library.

I guess it's better to be late than never to arrive at all, but I am particularly grateful to my colleague, Steve, who recognized early on that deep down inside this little techy nerd is a cool girl who just wants to play a little.

So... rock on... and bravo!