Friday, February 26, 2021

RIP Fryz

So a certain electronics chain shut down. When Tape Mountain was in full on CDR burning mode, many of its discs came from a certain aisle at the Fryz in Wilsonville. I'm contractually obligated to break out this chestnut:

NERD 1 (in lateral-lisp nerd voice): You can't get good media in Wilsonville.
NERD 2 (in nearly identical voice): Yeah, you gotta go to Beaverton to get good media.

My impression of these two CD-R enthusiasts still comes out every now and then and never fails to annoy the bejeezus out of my wife, mother, anyone else. It's even more horrible when my brother takes on the Nerd 2 role. Magical.

Other indelible Fryz memoriez:

  • Wanting electronics but feeling too poor to buy them (always)
  • Buying the world's most garish fake-iMac transparent blue plastic CRT monitor - it was horrible garbage and died about a year later
  • Having a sweaty salesman sell me a pretty good VCR in a space  that felt like it had never seen light, telling me that "Everyone knows Sony. Panasonic is kind of under the radar, so they have to try harder."
  • Back when the Wilsonville space was under the even-more-ludicrouz Incredibl Univerz, buying my first CD player (a never-quite satisfactory Magnavox - the price represented like an entire 40 hours of work, yikes...) so I could listen to promo CDs from the college radio station. Feeling like I had totally Sold Out by doing so. Listening to the one cutout bin CD that I owned (Eleventh Dream Day's Lived to Tell, which was kind of a snoozefest, but when it's the one CD you own..)