Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I don’t think of myself as someone who feels cynical about progress. Each new thing that comes along gives each of us the opportunity to apply our own world view and usual behavioural patterns to it.
This can be good and bad. For instance, I know that any financial transaction can be more or less instantly processed by the Clearing Bank, but there are still quite a few occasions when it takes five working days for money to ‘clear’. Why this has to happen is, of course, completely unclear.
My Holy Grail
I’m an inveterate seeker after obscure films. They’re not obscure to me, but they seem to be to almost everyone else.
I spent almost twenty years looking for a copy of a film called ‘Taking Off’. It was made in 1971 by Milos Forman, the acclaimed Czech director, who fled Prague in 1968 when the Russian tanks rolled in and put an end to the ‘Prague Spring’.
It’s a small film, made in New York, about the generation gap, and I loved it when I first saw it, but it was never transferred to video or DVD. I hunted high and low for it. It became my very own Holy Grail.
I finally bought a video that someone had taped off an obscure Sky channel and sold copies on eBay for far more money than they should.
This year I managed to get it transferred to a home-made DVD because I don’t do VHS any more. Almost immediately the film was released in a brand new spanking DVD version. That’s how these things go.
I never did find out why it took them so long to release it.
The wrong trousers
My searches for obscure films through the farther reaches of eBay and beyond sometimes cause me to buy a DVD that has a different region code. This is another opportunity for people who only like ‘normal’ films to accuse me of being ‘not normal’ and making a fuss.
I don’t understand why it’s necessary to put some code into a disc that stops you playing it on the machine that was made for that purpose, after you bought it freely on the Internet from another country.
If I bought a pair of trousers from a Website in Australia I would be annoyed if I was told I couldn’t wear them, so why should this be a problem with a film?
The imp in the machine
I do actually know why. The film companies like to release films at different times around the world, so they don’t want people buying the DVD before the film is released in the cinemas.
So what’s the result of that? Huge numbers of people illegally download the films for free from Russian Mafia sites instead of going to the cinema or buying the films. Then they watch them on their laptops. That makes a lot of sense.
Back in the Industrial Revolution workers out of a job used to smash the new machines. They were called Luddites. Nowadays it seems that new technology is sabotaged by the companies that supply it just to try to keep control of it.
Happiness is a new toy
My trusty old Sony DVD player is wearing out, and I’ve been looking for a Blu Ray player that plays multi-region DVDs to replace it. And it has to do various other things, of course.
Early this week I found just what I was looking for, from a company in Essex, so I bought it. They didn’t charge for delivery, although it might take a few days. Then I found out they wouldn’t deliver to the Isle of Wight. Why is that? Does anybody know? Luckily they’ll deliver to my work on the other island.
Yesterday I was phoned up by a very nice man from the Dispatch Department who said he had the machine in its box right in front of him. He confirmed that I wanted free delivery and then suggested that I might like to receive it quicker for a fee of £15. I declined gracefully.
After I put the phone down I thought about it. Presumably a courier would take the package and put it in a van and deliver it. The time it takes to do this is presumably easy to predict and should always be the same.
I had a vision of a warehouse in Essex full of racking, labelled – ’Ten days before giving it to the courier’, ‘Nine days…’ etc. I saw people religiously moving all the boxes along the shelves every morning and then dispatching them when they arrive at the correct place. Unless I paid to have them jump the queue.
The people who invent new technology are usually trying to make our lives simpler and easier and more fun, but the people who supply it often seem to have the opposite idea.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Image: photologue_np under CC BY 2.0
Image: Ste3ve under CC BY 2.0
Image: Antmoose under CC BY 2.0
Image: Dullhunk under CC BY 2.0
Image: Schmeegan under CC BY 2.0
Image: Thisisbossi under CC BY 2.0
