NEW KIT

I am becoming massively irritated at the modern tendency towards having to keep on getting new bits and pieces of technological guff just in order to get things which used to work perfectly well without such equipment to continue working, when things used to suit me just fine as they once were.

I have, of course (and after everything I said recently), now bitten another “new technology” bullet, and forked out for a relatively cheap blu-ray player to assist me with the viewing of TV shows via this new-fangled “remote streaming” mularkey which has been causing me such grief lately, but “thereby hangs another tale…” (which is something I might actually have said if anyone had asked, but, as was recently pointed out, “nobody notices” what I write, so I may as well lie through my teeth at you…)

Anyway, a tale does indeed hang thereby and, whilst it’s not necessarily the most exciting of tales to tell, I’m going to tell it anyway.

You see, I’ve already explained why our relationship with our online video rental company had started to crumble and that we had considered many options for solving the problem, and this was much on my mind when I “happened to” pop into a branch of one particular branch of supermarket one evening knowing full well that they sold the particular brand of disc player which I had found to be most likely to solve the worst of our problems with the brand new system.

As I grabbed the bread and the bananas and the milk which, of all our perishables, were the ones which were the most in need of urgent replenishment, I “just happened” to drift into the electrical department and had a bit of a disappointing mooch around.

I say “disappointing” because I simply couldn’t see the particular item I wanted, and I started to slink away with an air of resignation when I spotted a couple of tatty looking boxes on a high shelf around a corner at the end of an aisle marked with the very labelling that I was looking for…

After mere milliseconds of internal strife and deliberation, the least tatty looking of the boxes was in my basket and I was skipping merrily towards the checkout with the probability of being potentially a lot more skint than I planned to be suddenly an imminent likelihood, but happy in the discovery of a moment’s elation born out of the turgid soup of retail therapy.

As I got in the car a few minutes later, poorer and on the defensive, I was asked “What did you buy?” and I reeled off a list including bread, bananas, milk… and ended it with a rather lame and quietly muttered “…disc player…”

In all fairness, the roof was not hit, and my long soliloquy of justification was probably unnecessary as we made our way homewards, although eyes were beginning to roll during the remaining two and a half conscious hours left of the evening before I finally gave up and went to bed, after failing to find any way to get the link to one particular streaming company, which was, unfortunately, the main reason for buying that device, to work at all.

It didn’t help, of course, that I’d managed to choose the one night that their entire network crashed to make my purchase, so that even the website bearing the helpful hints for setting up my device was actually unavailable as I floundered around both looking and feeling like the useless idiot I usually convince myself that I am when it comes to such things.

I had a flash of inspiration (or explanation) overnight, of course….

Well, perhaps not so much a “flash” as a “slow burn” but I realised that I probably had to create an account with one company and then key in the mysterious digits presented me by the machine on one of the many screens which I had seen, although tracking the right screen down again might take some doing…

I set up the account on a decent computing device, but at that point I was far from home and didn’t have the vital digits with me (and they changed anyway next time I switched on) so, once again, everything ground to a halt as I pondered about the problem from a distance whilst I couldn’t actually do anything to solve it…

So, that evening, I got home with a spare half hour to fill, fully expecting to all be a breeze and then spent twenty minutes floundering around looking for the internet on my TV before realising that I could make the link via my computer, and indeed within moments I had the “congratulations, your device is now registered” message once I’d made the mental connections between the instructions.

Kids find this stuff so instinctive now, but I’m left feeling like a total prawn because it takes me so long to figure it all out.

Anyway, after having achieved a successful synching feeling, I then immediately had to go out, so I still didn’t know whether it actually worked or not…

But happily I can report that it did, although now I have developed a form of “range anxiety” with regards to my monthly download limits which meant trying to find out my account details from my telephone service provider.

And thereby, dear reader, hangs another tale…