Just can't give it away

I finally relented last night and put my VCR out on the kerb for the 6 monthly bulk rubbish collection. That means we have gone from a two VCR family to one, and the one remaining one gets used about as often as our bulk rubbish gets collected. I bought the blasted thing about 10 years ago for $200. At the time, it was a good unit - one of the first models with 4 heads or some such dribble. The bloke I bought it from got a well paying job with Cisco, so he wanted to flog it a few days after he bought it and buy a better model with his new found cash, so I got it cheap and still in the box.

I think I stopped plugging it into the TV about 5 years ago when I bought my first DVD player, and have been lugging it from house to house ever since. We tried giving it away to three people last year, and all three of them turned us down. No one has videos anymore. We did up until this move, but they ended up in the skip before the removalists arrived. Compared to digital TV, they look like crap, they're bulky and they have this bad habit of going "neek, neek, neek" and wrapping their innards around the moving parts of your VCR.

The person that used them the most in our house was monkey. Shortly after learning to crawl, he figured out how to open the video cupboard, into which he then crawled and ejected all the videos therein. He had much fun bashing the cardboard cases into shapeless messes, and banging the videos on every bit of furniture in the room. He even learnt to stack them after a while, which was difficult as the cases were so bent out of shape by his earlier ministrations.

Now all we have to do is figure out how to get rid of the spare DVD player. When purchased, it was a very fine LG unit, but it has since been superceded by a 5 stack home theatre system. Loading a single DVD is so 1999. Again, we tried to offload it on three different people last year, and all turned it down.

This is terrible. People have too much crap these days. I figure that instead of shipping goats to Africa for starving peasants, we should ship our spare home theatre equipment. Given the lack of electricity, they could make much better use of most of it. Like stacking it as bricks in a new house, or using the case as a BBQ.

Or beating the neighbour over the head with a VCR and stealing his charity goat.