Come now, people who rent movies from various outlets and services, what is your problem? Can it really be so difficult to make that mental leap between the amount of care with which one has to treat a VHS, and the level of caution demanded for the continued usefulness of a DVD?
I will tell you a story, reader:
Not long ago I wanted to watch a movie called "Last of the Mohicans" starring Daniel Day-Lewis et al., a film which I greatly enjoy, especially the beautifully acted, staged, and shot ending of the film, 10 minutes of cinema which are definitely part of my mental highlight reel. Not only was I looking forward to seeing this movie, but I had a guest at whom I had praised the film. We were both to be sorely disappointed.
I put the DVD in the drive of my computer (which, lacking a dedicated DVD player, I use to watch films) and we began to watch it, and we saw no more than thirty seconds of Daniel Day-Lewis and friends running through the woods before the video locked up. I ejected the disk, looked at it to determine the level of scratchiness (very high!), wiped it on my shirt (this being the approved method of dealing with DVD errors) and reinserted it. The video froze again, in nearly the same spot, and this time was such an apparently serious problem that my very DVD drive locked up. Es war kaputt! In the end I was required to eject the drive manually (that is, with a straightened paperclip shoved carefully into the appropriate maintenance aperture) and reboot my computer.
To sum up, somebody had handled that DVD with such carelessness and abandon that it broke my computer, albeit temporarily. How does this even happen? Did some prior user store the disk in a bag of gravel and slice it with a cutthroat razor? It's very simple--when you are watching the DVD, it is in the tray that projects out of the device you're watching it with. When you are not watching the DVD, it is in its case. By following these directives, the DVD should last you in the range of decades at least.
But no! Some arrant fool marred the data surface of the DVD, rendering it useless forevermore, and worse yet, this was a DVD rented from the University of Iowa Main Library, that is to say, a public good, making this not only an example of rank technological incompetence but also of the tragedy of the commons.
Speaking of which, I am making this post on a public terminal in the Library computer lab and about 15 feet from me a young man is using the computer provided to watch fan-edited videos of the Japanese anime series "Yu-Yu Hakusho" on Youtube. He has been doing this for as long as I've been here, about 1/2 hour. Is he making better use of University resources than I am? Maybe.
