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I bought 2,000 tapes when I was 18 for 40$ , My cassette journey


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The year was 2014. I had just gotten into cassette tapes after dusting off my father's old Sony Walkman and starting to play his 100 or so old tapes from the 80s and 90s. I had taken two or three trips to my local record store buying 20 or so dollar bin tapes at a time based mostly on the look of the covers. About two moths in I typed in "tapes" on craigslist on a whim; I ended up stumbling on a local ad for "1600+ tapes" with an asking price of 220$. The picture on the listing was of a shipping pallet completely loaded with 16 or so banker boxes full of tapes. My whole body started shaking at the very thought of this many tapes all for sale at once; the only problem was I only had 40$ to my name. So..... casting aside all humility I sent out an email to the seller reading something along the lines of " Hey, I think your collection is awesome and honestly your asking price is way more than fair, however I am a broke high school student so I can only offer you 40$. I know this is a very low offer but it is all I have to offer. I hope you find someone to pay your asking price but if nobody else ends up wanting them let me know. Thank you for your time."  I expected to never hear back from him until three weeks later on an otherwise uninteresting Wednesday when he sent me an email saying " I have been storing the tapes in my bosses' warehouse (some kind of lumber business I think) and he says I have until the end of the day to get them out or they are going in the dumpster so ill accept your 40$ offer". Extremely exited I drove out with my Dad the second school ended that day to pick up the tapes. When i got there I soon realized what was listed as 1600+ tapes was in fact about 2,000 tapes. It took only 10ish minutes to load them into the family van which was subsequently riding down on the shocks on the way home with no visibility through the rear view mirror.  I conned a friend of mine into helping me haul them all upstairs to my room later that day. I had absolutely no floor space in my room for about three weeks until I finally talked my Dad into buying me an Ikea kallax 4 by 4 cube shelf and another 2 by 4 cube shelf to stack on top of that. The tapes filled the 4 by 4 completely and took up about half the 2 by 4. To be fair a lot of what I ended up with in the collection was grunge, hip hop, mainstream 80s pop and that kind of stuff but there were a lot of cool finds mixed in too and at 2 cents a tape I wasn't about to complain. Sadly today I live in a small apartment and most of my tapes are currently in my parents storage unit as they have since sold the house (honestly really nice of them to let me take up like 1/5 of their unit which they pay for so I am not complaining). While I did bring most of my favorites with me when I moved out I cant wait until the day I move into a house and can pull the rest of my collection out of storage. Sorry this story was so long and thanks for reading.               

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