why i need a self-changing vcr

Last week, I finished yet another business class…a class which I took with the hope of earning yet another degree…a degree I’m trying to earn with the hope of getting yet another job. A better, more lucrative job. A job which, I’m beginning to think, doesn’t exist.

The final for this latest class consisted of watching a video taped interview and applying all of the valuable insights that had been gleaned over the course of the class and summarizing these insights into a tidy little report. The tape was handed out the week before the final class and, ever the studious student, I stuck it into my VCR that same night. Visions of A+s danced through my head…visions which lasted only 20 minutes, because at this point the video tape bored me into an early slumber upon my couch.

The tape sat forgotten in my VCR until that weekend when, once again, I decided to revive the dancing A+ visions and try to get through the entire thing. I hit the rewind button to account for the lost minutes which I slept through, and pressed ‘play’. Much to my surprise, the video taped final that I would be graded on was not what appeared on my television screen. Rather, I found myself watching the last few minutes of that week’s episode of Lost.

And it dawned on me that I had forgotten to replace the tape of my final with a different video tape. My VCR, being set to tape Lost every week, just wasn’t smart enough to figure out that I had the wrong tape inside and replace it with a different one.

Truthfully, my patience with the television show Lost is wearing thin, and I’m about ready to scratch it off my TV show viewing list. Yet, every week I tape it in the hopes that something will be answered…or, at the very least, that something will happen. Nothing ever does, but still I continue to tape.

Knowing that a report on my feelings for the show Lost would most likely not get me that A+ on my final, I watched the remaining 30 minutes which had been spared, and constructed a paper with a pretty good beginning, a decent ending, but that was mysteriously vague on the whole middle part. And as I wait for my grade to arrive in the mail, I worry less about the missing middle part of my report and more that the professor found out that one of his video finals now had an episode of Lost inserted into it.

And, in the event that he didn’t, I’m quite certain that someday, some other student will be watching, and fervently taking notes, when suddenly their final is replaced by a bunker in the middle of a jungle. They’ll probably pause to wish unspeakable tortures on the idiot who taped over their final. Though, I’m willing to bet, that they too will have a middle-less report.