The Cooper family is gathered for breakfast. Mary is reading the newspaper, George Sr. is drinking coffee, Missy is poking her scrambled eggs, and Sheldon is staring intently at a blank cassette tape he’s placed on the table next to a portable tape recorder.
Sheldon is in his room, finally listening to his new, carefully guarded master tape. It’s perfect—except at the very end, faintly, you hear Missy whisper into the mic: “Asymptote.” Sheldon stares at the recorder, then slowly smiles.
"I’ve decided to document my intellectual journey. Not in writing—that’s too slow. Not on video—that requires eye contact. I will use pure, uncompressed audio. Compact Cassette is lossy and inferior. So I’ve ordered a reel-to-reel recorder from a ham radio operator in Amarillo. Until it arrives, I am practicing with this… peasant-grade medium."
"I’ll pray on it."
"So you’re talking to yourself now instead of just to God?"
"Son, I don’t care if your asymptote sounded like ‘ass-im-toat.’ I’m missing the touchdown."
“She’s learning. I’m both terrified and… proud. That’s called cognitive dissonance. It sounds better in AIFF.”
Sheldon has a meltdown so severe he tries to "degauss" the tape by holding it over the microwave.
