Monday, April 07, 2014
Back when I was a kid, people rented videotapes from their local video store. Our family had a stand-alone videotape rewinder, a device which rewound the videotape without wearing out or straining the motor in the videotape player. The video store had a policy requiring videotapes to be rewound prior to returning; a fee could be assessed if this wasn't done. Only on rare occasions did a videotape slip through the cracks and arrive at our home unwound... which was an irritating inconvenience but simply required a quick rewind.
Flash forward to 2014. We live in the utopian future where rewinding is an archaic memory. The only problem is that something far worse has taken its place. Every time I have rented a movie from Redbox the data surface of the disc has been marred by greasy fingerprints. Just last night I rented American Hustle which obviously only should have been handled by an adult, and it looked like the previous viewer must have been in the middle of a Kentucky Fried Chicken 5 piece meal...
It has become my standard operating procedure to wash each disc with warm soapy water, then gently dry before inserting into my disc player. This is far more inconvenient than the occasional pre-viewing rewind that was necessary 20 years ago.
Now let's analyze what this all means:
1) With videotapes there was a buffer -- the video store -- it's impossible to know how many people returned videos without first rewinding them.
2) It is possible that people are stupid, i.e. they handle the disc incorrectly, thus contaminating and damaging their own disc players.
3) Or, people are selfish, only mishandling the disc after they have viewed it, returning it to Redbox worse than they received it.
When I discussed this very subject with Peter late last night, he made some loose connection with something he had heard Rush Limbaugh say; apparently Limbaugh has been calling people "low information voters" instead of idiots. Peter suggested that my Redbox observations are a microcosm of a far more troubling trend... He's concerned that Limbaugh's "low information voter" terminology is dangerously close to romanticizing something that most likely will lead to self-destruction. Peter says that my experience with Redbox discs is proof that most people are idiots and selfish. He then went all politics on me, suggesting that President Obama's election to office and subsequent re-election represents the same thing. Before I could stop him, he went even further, saying that a significant number of votes Mitt Romney received in 2012 most likely were from the very same idiots who accidently rent Blu-Ray discs from Redbox kiosks even when all they own is a DVD player. These people are so stupid that the inadvertently do the right thing, even though every cell of their being is programmed to do the opposite.
At this point, as you can probably imagine, I told Peter that he was getting a bit carried away, and we parted ways.
I'm guessing that one of you smartasses is thinking "I stream all my movies, so I don't have any of these problems." Well, you're a selfish idiot too.
