Thursday, January 04, 2007

Trust Is Ruined By Technology

We borrowed a few DVDs over the holiday period. Not much on telly, don't see enough movies and generally not enough time to see them during the working part of the year. Borrowed five per week or so. Hostage with Bruce Willis was great, Rumo(u)r Has It with Jennifer Aniston (not a fan of) was very good, some movie I watched with Arnie in it, Collateral Damage (that's it), showed that he is too old for even his style of action movie and would barely rate 3/10. Master and Commander with Russell Crowe was excellent and The Machinist with Christian Bale was very dark but well written and strangely enjoyable.

A couple of days ago I returned from holidays and there was a message on my answering machine saying I had a Batman DVD overdue by nine days. It intrigued me that nobody notified us of this on the last occasion that we borrowed DVDs. You would think that this definitely should have been brought to my attention earlier. I rang them up and was informed that two other movies were two days overdue also.

My recollection is that Yu-Jin dropped off the DVDs from the first lot whilst I was in the car. The second lot, with the two other outstanding DVDs, I distinctly recall walking into the store with him and he had trouble holding them all before depositing them in the returns slot. I thought that my assistance would be required but he didn't want any help and put all five of the DVDs in the slot. This is quite clear.

Anyway, the video guy said that he would check if they had been put back on the shelf without being booked back in. And, thankfully, as I don't wish to pay some extravagent charge for replacing lost DVDs that I haven't actually lost, they were found and an apology was issued for having put me through the worry.

Was it the system that broke down or was there a failure with the technology? In any case my trust has been lowered of the system and I wish to hand returned DVDs directly to the video people and have them check them off immediately. I can't trust them to be taken care of otherwise.

2 comments:

honkeie said...

I got a letter once saying I owed them like 30$ for a late dvd I know I returned. After alot of bad noise and yelling, they found the damn movie. Someone had forgot to input it......modern technology is only as good as the idiot at the keyboard.

Hammy said...

Damn straight. I was thinking that it could be up to $80 each as that was the going rate back in the heydays of the video.

All's well that ends well.