When I was a kid, if I wanted to watch tv I just walked over to it and turned it on. Then I turned a dial to the channel I wanted. There were three. If I wanted to watch Sesame Street I had to flip a little switch on the back of the TV and turn it to UHF. Granted, it was in black and white - we didn't get our first color TV until I was 10. One day my kids were complaining that a Shirley Temple movie they were watching was boring because it was black and white. I told them that when I was their age, everything was in black and white. My four year old looked at me wide-eyed and said, "You mean the world was black and white?"
If we wanted to watch a movie we had to go to the theater, or wait for the TV version. Then along came VCRs and videos, opening up a whole new world to us. On the weekends we would rent a VCR and 2 or 3 movies. In a few years, we owned our own VCR. My little sister watched Cinderella until it broke. When I started my own family we started collecting Disney movies for the kids, that was 90 minutes a day of uninterrupted housework. I even knew how to hook one up to the tv all by myself. By the time my kids were 2, they could put a video in and play it all by themselves. Life was good.
Videos were bulky and they took up a lot of shelf space. The kids never put them back in their cases when they were through watching them and I was constantly hunting down matched sets. Then DVDs came along. I still had to hunt for the cases and put them away, but it was a smaller mess. I tried everything to control it. I put them on a high shelf. I locked them up. I confiscated them. I bribed the kids. I threatened them...
Six years ago my husband and resident geek, Karry, decided the way to solve this was to put all of our movies on the computer. Perfect solution, right? We just put the originals in a box in the attic and I can repurpose the cabinet they were stored in. No more mess, no more scratched DVD's. Oh, how I long for the days when watching TV was simply turning on a switch, or when I wanted to watch a movie all I had to do was put a disc in the DVD player and turn on the tv. I imagine it's a lot like when an empty nester tells you that some day you will miss all the noise and the clutter.
Now watching TV requires a PhD. We bought a Roku - still not even sure what that is. Then the Apple TV was the end all be all. For a while we had both. To further complicate things we also had an xbox hooked up. Just watching tv was complicated enough. I rarely watch tv, so I can never remember which setting is for tv, which is for the xbox, which one is the dvd player, and so on. If there was a kid around, any age, they could do it for me. But now adding the computer to the tv is a lethal combination. Twice when Karry was away on business I had a bunch of friends over to watch a movie, and both times we couldn't get the movie to work or I couldn't find it. Even with Karry, cursing me under his breath on the other end of the phone walking me through it. It's on the Apple tv, no it's on the Roku, it's on a DVD in the attic. I don't remember which one, but one of them I had to flip through the movies one at a time to get to the W's.
I finally gave up tv all together. Between the tivo, the apple tv, the roku, the computer, and the xbox I could never remember what was what. If I wanted to watch just the tv, I had to turn it on, stand on my head click my heels three times and recited an incantation to get to the correct screen. That is, if I could locate the remote and if it still had it's batteries. If I wanted to watch a movie, it required two remotes, a child to help me through the process, another child to reset the thing-a-ma-jig and some kind of animal sacrifice, and then if the tv gods were in a good mood I might get to watch my show.
Finally after years of complaints, I asked him to make me a manual to refer to, so I could remember how to watch my show. He decided to make life easier for me. He has the perfect solution this time. Now I have one remote control that turns on the tv and takes me to a screen where I can select netflix, hulu, tv, any of our movies, you name it. It does everything but give me a foot rub. Things were great for the first two days. Then one day our internet was slow, so I couldn't get to Hulu. Another day it didn't come on at all, and yesterday we had no sound for some reason. It seems like when it comes to electronics we've just come to accept that they will only work 75% of the time, and if we just wait it out, it will work in two hours, or tomorrow. And we put up with the inconvenience because they make our lives easier. Do they?
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