Amazon Delivers -- Right to Your Trunk

I finally quit making mix tapes — and started making mix CDs — around the turn of the century, when my car was broken into and years worth of irreplaceable tapes were stolen. Before I’d noticed the theft, I knew something was wrong as soon as I opened the car door. We human beings can sense when strangers have been in our space, little cues we pick up on subconsciously that all is not how we left it.

That’s the story I thought of when reading this Engadget item about an Amazon pilot program in Germany:

Tired of having to stay home (or ship to the office) just to collect your online orders? If you live in Germany and drive the right car, you might not have to. In an expansion of what Volvo tried last year, Amazon is teaming up with Audi and DHL for a trial that delivers Amazon Prime purchases directly to connected Audi cars in the Munich area. All you have to do is provide the rough location of your car during the delivery window — after that, the DHL courier gets temporary access to the trunk of your vehicle to drop off your packages. Suffice it to say that this could be more than a little handy if you’re busy working or visiting family.

I’m not sure the added convenience would be enough to overcome the Ooginess Factor of strangers getting into my car, even if it is only the trunk.

How about you?

And now for a short aside.

I didn’t even make mix CDs for very long before throwing my hands up at the new format and getting an iPod.

I was very picky about what cassettes tapes to use, and by the late ’80s had settled on Sony’s UX-Pro 90. They weren’t metal, so I could play them anywhere, and had better sound reproduction than anything else. The 45 minute-per-side format was perfect, too — less than an hour so your ears didn’t get bored, but still long enough to take listeners on a musical journey of sorts. The flip side would be another 45 minutes on the same theme, but usually with less-popular tracks — just like the flip side of a 45 RPM single.

(See the mix tape discussion scene in High Fidelity for just how involved we serious mix-tapers could get.)

But CDs don’t have sides. And 72 minutes was too short for one thing and too long for the other. And they always got scratched up in the car.

So I joined the 21st Century and got an MP3 player big enough to hold everything, and now I obsess over my Brilliant Playlists instead.