Programmed for a Familiar Match--Man Against VCR

I recently bought a new videocassette recorder. I couldn’t program my old one. I don’t think it was entirely because I’m not intelligent. There was something wrong with it. But I’d had so much trouble with it I didn’t want to have it repaired. Better to make a clean start.

I went to the Good Guys in Pasadena and paid $499 for a Sony with high fidelity and a new feature called VCR Plus+, by which you can program your VCR simply by entering the number printed after a program entry in the TV Times. Instead of having to enter Channel 5, 6 p.m., 2 hours, Aug. 27, 1992, you just enter 375128, or whatever number is listed after that program.

Sounded divine, and probably a lot cheaper than the one I hear advertised on my car radio--the one you merely have to talk to have it tape a show.

My son Doug came over to hook it up for me. I’m not too good at electrical connections. I then settled in with the instruction book. It had 74 pages. Much of it appeared to be about functions that I would probably not bother with: skip, pause, slow motion, index and so forth. At least it was written in English, not pidgin, like they used to be.

By following instructions, I brought in the pictures of all available channels. I put in a tape and tried recording. It worked, but while it was recording one channel, I couldn’t tune in another.

Then, after I stopped taping, I couldn’t change channels. It was usually stuck on a religious channel. I soon tired of shrieking hymns and plangent preaching. The book gave a 714 number for customer service. I called it. It rang busy. I tried it one munute later. Still busy. I tried it a dozen more times, at one-minute intervals. By then I had to go out to lunch. When I came back I tried the number every five minutes. I got a ring at 3:30.

Then a woman’s voice said, “Thank you for calling Sony. Please continue to hold for the next representative.” This message was repeated every 45 seconds, against a background of chamber music. After 12 repetitions a woman’s voice said, “Can I help you?”

We had a brief talk. Her name was Dana. She answered my question. I hated to hang up, but I couldn’t think of anything else to ask her.

The next morning I found that I could not get the tape to eject. I pushed what I thought was the eject button several times, but nothing happened.

“We have to take it in,” I told my wife, hating the thought. I put it back in its box and my wife carried it to the car. When we got to the Good Guys she carried it to the door where a Good Guy took it and carried it to the service counter. “No problem,” he said. Really a Good Guy.

The service man said, “What seems to be the trouble?” I told him. He pressed a button. It wasn’t the same button I had been pressing. The tape ejected.

“How do you explain that?” I asked, not admitting I had been pressing the wrong button. “Just one of those things,” he said.

We took it home and reconnected it. The TV didn’t work. I realized that in disconnecting it I had undone all the programming I had already done. I did it all over again, step by step.

It worked. I was licking it. I was now four days into our relationship. More than once I had been close to tears. It was dominating my life.

As one of the Good Guys had warned me, the VCR Plus+ worked only with Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. To record the other channels I had to use a rather more complicated “timer” system. However, with some trial and error, I mastered both.

On Saturday morning I was watching a tennis match between Petr Korda and Stefan Edberg when I had to go to Pasadena with my wife. The match was to be followed by one between Ivan Lendl and Michael Chang. I am a fan of Lendl and wanted to see the match. No problem. I set the tape and we went to Pasadena.

When we came home I watched the end of the Korda-Edberg match on playback and was watching the second set of the Lendl-Chang match when the picture shut off. The tape had run out. Back to the instruction book. I found that the tape could be set at two speeds--one good for only two hours, the other for six. It was set for two hours.

I read in the paper the next day that Lendl won.