One of my VCRs is on its last legs. Well okay, not legs… little foam thingies that it stands on… on its last… those. Despite regular service, it’s been playing up for years – almost since I got it, in fact. It refused to wind some brands of tape at anything approaching a sensible speed. Just occasionally it would refuse to deal with a tape altogether.
And now it’s started actually chewing tapes it doesn’t like, and believe me, it’s got no taste whatsoever. I don’t mind telling you, I’ll never buy a Sharp video recorder again. In fact, I’ll probably avoid buying a Sharp anything from now on.
So, I’m getting it replaced, and thanks to wondrous trends in consumer electronics, the replacement will have more features, be more reliable, and cheaper. But the best bit is, I get to dispose of this errant VCR. I get to extract my revenge on it for so many years of agro.
How will I do this? I don’t know yet. I’ve thought of a number of scenarios.
- hanging it by its power cord out of the window and dropping it into the car park
- running over it in the car
- dissecting it on the kitchen table, then trying to put it back together and seeing how many bits I have left over
- testing whether or not it will float
- planting it in the garden to see if a new one will grow
- experimenting to find out if it will bounce
And of course I could take AC/DC’s suggestion and blow up my video.
Does anybody have any better ideas? If so, send them along to killvcr @ toxiccustard.com. And keep an eye on this page, or subscribe to the mailing list to see the results sometime next week.
Postscript: Destruction of the VCR eventually happened in August 2001. Read all about it here.
