Problems of the past

Someone on Twitter posted this image last week:

And for those who do not know what it is, my children, back in the dark days of the last century, before you could stream “content” on any device you owned, people who wanted more to watch than their broadcast and cable TV channels offered had to rent physical video cassette tapes from a place called Blockbuster Video. You went into the shop, picked out what you wanted to see, paid money for it and then went home and put it in what was called a “VCR” (video cassette recorder) machine. Then you returned it to the store.

The catch was—you were supposed to rewind the tape after you watched it. If you didn’t rewind it before returning, you got fined, like when you returned a library book late.

Which brings me to libraries—sometimes local libraries would lend (or rent) video tapes to patrons. And the same rule applied: you had to rewind the tape to start before taking it back or get a fine.

And that brings me to the memory triggered by seeing this image.

The local rag for Williamsburg, Va., was called The Virginia Gazette. And the Gazette maintained an answering machine where anyone could leave a message about, well, anything that came to mind. Kind of like letters to the editor, but without having to write.

Like letters, the paper printed some of the more family-friendly offerings, which could be pretty off-the-wall, as I recall. I thought the worst job at the Gazette had to be whoever had to check the answering machine every morning and listen to the rant-de-la-nuit.

The one that stands out after more than three decades is the library patron who—for reasons unknown—had checked out Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. (First of all, Kubrick; second, Vietnam War; really—do the math.) The patron had been utterly disgusted after powering through maybe five or six minutes of the film. He (pretty sure on the gender, and I’m guessing age was post-retirement) ejected it from the VCR, wrote “FILTH! SMUT!” on the label and returned it, unrewinded, to the library.

What really outraged him—besides the notion that the Williamsburg Library would have such vile materials on its shelves—and drove him to the Gazette’s open line, was that he got fined for defacing the tape (and probably for not rewinding it). That he had to share with the entire readership.

These days, of course, all he’d have to do is raise up on his White hind legs, declare something disgusting and get it banned from the library. And he wouldn’t have to worry about rewinding anything.