At Least its Not "Metric Time" Again
Say you start playing a movie at 10 pm. Halfway though, you stop. Maybe you’re falling asleep. Maybe you’ve got a baby upstairs who wakes up crying. (When our son was born, I don’t think my wife and I finished a feature film in one night for an entire year.) You go to bed, and now you’re sort of stuck: you’ve got to finish the movie the next night before 10 pm or your carriage turns back into a pumpkin.
Hi David–You know what this country needs? A good 27-hour on-demand viewing timeframe. Typically, you get 24 hours to watch your on-demand movie. Here’s what happens time and again to my wife and me. We get the kids down, and about 8, we click an on-demand movie to watch. I get sleepy by 9:30 (I work hard, okay?) and turn it off but I want to see the rest of the movie the next day. Next day, I get the kids down at 8 and—poof—the rest of the movie has disappeared. If it’s free, I have to fastforward through the movie (which is particularly slow and annoying). If I paid for it, then it’s particularly enraging. With a 27 hours to view the show, all problems solved.
This EXACT scenario happened to my wife and me over the holidays–twice, in fact. We started a movie, got busy or tired, decided to finish it the next night–but found that it had been auto-deleted. We’d missed the option to see the rest of the movie by only an hour! What ever happened to the logic of the Blockbuster-style 2-day or 3-day rental period, anyway? A 24-hour period doesn’t really make any sense at all.
I couldn’t agree more.
The lesson here is that apparently, when you have children, you can never again watch a movie all the way through. And yet “Big Reproduction” continues to propagate the notion that the day you acquire one of these bundles of sadness may be the happiest day of your life. Nader, maybe you should stop wasting your time on seatbelts and get the TRUTH out about babies. Ancient Spartans, landed British gentry, and people who make up fake ‘African’ proverbs know that it takes a village to raise a child. What I didn’t realize is that the village is there to corral the children in one place while I find out what happens at the end.