I stopped being a technofile in 1996, the year I officially decided to become a writer and
ceased having any sort of disposable income with which to buy newer forms of technology.
To this day I've never owned a cell phone, let alone Bluetooth. I don't TiVo or DVR and
when I direct friends to cool websites, I still start out by saying, "Okay, type h-t-t-p ... "
I've never had a problem with being such a Luddite until now that I've moved out of my
apartment and into my first house. Specifically, I have a deep loathing for my gigantic,
outdated VHS tape collection. I suppose I'd hate this monolithic tape collection less if I
didn't also own an even more elephantine cassette tape collection to boot.
Thing is, I wasn't even techno savvy back in the day - most of my VHS tapes run out in
the middle of a show because it wasn't until 1995 when I finally learned there were
different tape speeds. Most of the movies I've recorded play up until the climax, then
suddenly the blue screen will appear and the tape starts rewinding. I can't get rid of them
simply because of the sheer amount of effort that went into making the damn things in the
first place. I'm like a 2-year-old not wanting to flush the toilet for the first time: "But I
made that ... "
So I had no choice but to pack my 200-plus VHS tapes into more than a dozen boxes, and
my wife had to take an extra day off from work just to accommodate the extra trips it took
to haul everything to our new home. By the time we finished unloading the boxes, it was
late at night. My wife collapsed on the couch. "Let's watch a movie," she suggested. "Pick
out an action flick, something mindless."
I rustled through my VHS collection and chose one I like.
"Tell me something, Jess," I said, waving the mysterious black tape in front of her. "Have
you ever seen the first 42 minutes of "Romancing the Stone 2"?
- Dave Yoo