THE LATEST THING

I am, I suppose, not the most “cutting” edge of people when it comes to matters of new technology.  I don’t go out and buy the “latest thing” because (1) I can seldom afford it and (2) I tend to think that these days the “latest thing” tends to hang around for about two months before being superseded by the next “latest thing…”

So why exactly am I mentioning this today, you are perhaps wondering…?

Well, boys and girls, today I am mostly annoyed with my online DVD rental company.

We’ve been with them for about five years now, if not longer. Ever since, in fact, we decided that our (or rather my) accumulation of bought shiny discs was bordering on the ridiculous and that renting instead of buying might mean that we didn’t disappear under a pile of shiny plastic once the shelf space started to run out.

“Oh yes… So how did that work out for you, then…?”

“Not so well”, he said, emerging from under that very pile… But I suppose it did take a little longer than it might have done and we were able to sort of at least some of the chaff before we decided to part with our hard-earned.

Anyway, that’s not why I’m annoyed with them.  No, I’m annoyed with them because yesterday we finished watching season three of an old TV show which lasted five-seasons, and I went to add year four to the rental list (because you don’t want the computerised selection process to ever send you the years out of order, do you?) only to find that it was now only available as a download.

It was year two of “Dollhouse” all over again.

Now I know that this is the modern way, just as I know that we’ve already looked into the possibility of going down the download route and chosen to reject it.

You see, we accumulate TV on our own apparently incompatible (because we bought it too early) digital recording device at an alarming rate as it is, and it just sits there, waiting to be caught up with at some, as yet undefined, future point. If we go down the download route, we’ll just accumulate more of that kind of thing whereas the arrival of the disc always used to prompt us to switch off, calm down, settle ourselves in front of the TV and actually watch the bloody thing.

More annoying, I suppose, is the presumption involved of the whole thing. We liked things to be on shiny disc. I still do, to be perfectly honest with you. Just as I still want to be able to buy my music in a physical form. Having those discs arrive through the post kind of worked for us. But the company we use seem to think that everyone must by now have a PlayStation or a Wii or a Smart TV or a Blu-Ray player or the latest in laptop or tablet technology and, you see, we actually have none of these things, and, the part of me which rails against the continuous march of new technology adding to the pile of crap we’re going to leave behind us when we go, why the hell should I have these things?

We did consider trying to hook up the laptop to the TV as per suggestion only to find that it pre-dates such exciting developments and was probably bought an entire three months too early (you never can buy a gizmo at precisely the right moment, can you?) and so will require many other bits and bobs attaching to it, none of which (if you read the reviews) are guaranteed to succeed.

There is one other option we have, although that too requires yet another lead to be bought, and that involves making a portable device unavailable for the duration of the film and taking out another brand new account which would then need combining with the old one and which, quite frankly is taking a bloody liberty.

I know that I really ought to embrace the future, but these people with their “one size fits all” notions of the world really, really annoy me, and I do think that cancelling the account might be the best way to go, after all, I don’t think that they want the likes of me as a customer any more anyway.

It’s not as if we haven’t got anything else to watch, after all…