Learn, damn you, learn!

Why is it that my parents cannot fathom the fucking VCR? Three weeks away in the US built up a lot of anticipation over the episodes of "Lost" that I'd missed. Number of episodes successfully recorded: Zero. And now I'm back from Berlin, with yet another episode unrecorded because my Dad didn't know how to recognise a tape at the end of its spool.

For the eight or nine years of having a VCR, I've been the one to record everything, and had to deal with my parents phoning me up in Japan last year to ask how it works despite me having gone through the manual with them in painstaking detail before I left.

Since a few months ago we've had a newer, slightly more sophisticated one, and I used the excuse of being too busy with exams to learn how to use it so as to FORCE my father to figure it out for himself out of sheer necessity (ie. otherwise it would have been a toss up between coming to my graduation or staying at home to watch Live8). And don't even get me started on the reasons why they decided not to buy a DVD recorder.

In some ways I long for a day when technology will reach that Star-trek stage where you can just ask an appliance to do something and it understands. But then I know that my mother would be like, "VCR, can you record Richard and Judy for me?"

And then half and hour later, "VCR, you know Richard and Judy is on in five minutes, don't you?"

And then six minutes later, "You're sure you've started recording?"

And the VCR would be chewing up the tape in anger...