Every year in December the major studios send out DVDs of the films they’re pushing for Oscars, Directors Guild, and Writers Guild of America awards. So far this year I’ve received somewhere between 15 and 20 of them. Why haven’t I counted before writing this? That would take more effort than I can expend right now. Mainly because I’m already exhausted from the task of turning on my DVD player, inserting the disks, and getting them to play properly.
Last night, for example, it took me an hour and a half to just get my 2 year old Magnavox DVD player to power up. That’s 5 minutes of sitting on the living room couch and pointing the remote at it and swearing when nothing happened, 10 minutes of standing at the machine and pushing the standby/on switch and swearing nothing happened, another 5 minutes of unplugging and replugging and jiggling and knocking (pronounced “Ka-nocking” the way my father used to say it), 69 minutes of scouring the interwebs looking for the right user manual and other online advice, and 1 last glorious minute of “rebooting” (yes, I too thought that was only a computer thing) the %&#@ player by unplugging it, pressing the standby/on switch and holding it in as I plugged again.
Sorry, but that effort and its result do not qualify for any reaction resembling “Voila!”