The Perks of Being a DVD Player Hoarder
Back in the fall, my book club (Page & Popcorn) set a date to go see The Perks of Being a Wallflower in the movie theater and discuss it and the book afterward. Wanting to give ourselves enough time to read the book, we shot a little to far into the future and chose a date that ended up being a few days after the movie fell off the face of the Earth (where Earth = Manhattan). When we realized this, we rescheduled the event for a time when the movie would be out on DVD and we could have the meeting in the comfort of someone's apartment. Sources indicated the DVD would be released around the holidays, so we chose the second Saturday of the new year.
A week before the event, I went to move Perks to the top of my Netflix queue and I discovered that the DVD wasn't being released until February. BLERG, I thought to myself, and asked a fellow book clubber if she had any ideas. She did, and magicked a "screener" copy. Problem temporarily solved.
It had occurred to me to test the DVD in our DVD player before the event to make sure it worked, but I didn't get around to it. Work is exactly what it did not do when I inserted it into the DVD player with nine fellow book clubbers waiting in anticipation. The machine told us it was an invalid disc. We cycled the power and employed the traditional Nintendo cartridge blow-in-it technique, and no dice.
This DVD player belonged to my roommate, and was until recently kept in her room. She brought it out to the living room when our previous DVD player stopped working. The broken DVD player was still around, so we tried that one. Much to our surprise, it worked! For about 90 seconds. The machine stalled at the opening title card and refused to budge. I then used the same troubleshooting methods as I did with the other DVD player, but now it refused to recognize there was a disc inside it at all.
We looked into the possibility of getting it On Demand, but it wasn't available. Someone suggested hooking a laptop up to the TV and watching the movie that way, but we'd need a special cable for that. I opened up our drawer of stray cables to see if that was even the remotest of possibilities, and what should I find but a THIRD DVD PLAYER! It had been so long since I'd seen this one that I'd forgotten why we'd banished it to the stray cable drawer in the first place. We plugged it in, inserted the DVD, knocked on wood, and it worked.
If there's a moral to this story, I guess it's that when God closes a door, he opens a DVD player.
A week before the event, I went to move Perks to the top of my Netflix queue and I discovered that the DVD wasn't being released until February. BLERG, I thought to myself, and asked a fellow book clubber if she had any ideas. She did, and magicked a "screener" copy. Problem temporarily solved.
It had occurred to me to test the DVD in our DVD player before the event to make sure it worked, but I didn't get around to it. Work is exactly what it did not do when I inserted it into the DVD player with nine fellow book clubbers waiting in anticipation. The machine told us it was an invalid disc. We cycled the power and employed the traditional Nintendo cartridge blow-in-it technique, and no dice.
This DVD player belonged to my roommate, and was until recently kept in her room. She brought it out to the living room when our previous DVD player stopped working. The broken DVD player was still around, so we tried that one. Much to our surprise, it worked! For about 90 seconds. The machine stalled at the opening title card and refused to budge. I then used the same troubleshooting methods as I did with the other DVD player, but now it refused to recognize there was a disc inside it at all.
We looked into the possibility of getting it On Demand, but it wasn't available. Someone suggested hooking a laptop up to the TV and watching the movie that way, but we'd need a special cable for that. I opened up our drawer of stray cables to see if that was even the remotest of possibilities, and what should I find but a THIRD DVD PLAYER! It had been so long since I'd seen this one that I'd forgotten why we'd banished it to the stray cable drawer in the first place. We plugged it in, inserted the DVD, knocked on wood, and it worked.
If there's a moral to this story, I guess it's that when God closes a door, he opens a DVD player.