Barney, Fantasia, Rocky Horror, yoga, Aladdin, Bananas in Pyjamas, Blue, Turandot, Suzy Aiken fitness … (the list goes on) but it has all gone – into a rubbish skip in my post-Christmas clean-out frenzy!
Videos is what I’m talking about. Why? Well who watches videos these days so who would buy them even on TradeMe. Indeed my children think CDs and DVDs are pretty much obsolete and prefer to download everything.
So I bit the bullet – and disposed of a huge pile of videos that represented many hours of enjoyable viewing time by those same children when they were young. However, one friend was horrified – and said to me “but why – videos are so much more reliable”.
And indeed when I thought about it, it’s actually true. When a video misbehaved, there were three very good solutions:
- Stop – remove – and give the tape a little whack and re-insert
- Stop – and run fast forward or backward – and then run until you find your place again
- Run video tape/head cleaner.
But when a DVD packs a sad – well that’s it really. You just scream with annoyance.
And then there is the ease of recording. OK – so we don’t yet have Mi-sky or Tivo. But the fact remains, that in the wonderful video age we could watch one channel and record another – and it worked. Since we entered the cable age, our luck with recording has been extremely variable, and we can’t record while watching another channel.
So much for progress!
While I’m on the nostalgia rant, I need to mention the floppy disks that have also been “disposed” of. It was true that we’d had a large box of totally unusable disks sitting underneath our computers for several years past their use by date!
But again, a little flash of sadness – there goes the Netscape dial up kit from when we first got the internet, clip art masterpieces, scanned photos, Prince of Persia and other “classic” (probably extremely simplistic) games.
The next task is for the “children” to review all the games. Apparently apart from the useless freebies there are many both computer and Playstation games that no longer work so we could be rid of them. It is a actually a good feeling to be tidying up one’s life – am sure it must be good feng shui or something! Shame about the landfill but what can you do …
