Stupid Technology

Bored in my home with nothing to do at 10PM on a Tuesday, an idea for entertainment struck me. You see, I have a very cool DVD player. It's a Blu-ray player. The guy at Best Buy told me how cool it is. It is so cool, it connects to the internet - wirelessly, mind you - and links up with my Netflix account. Thus, I can stream Netflix movies from the online universe directly to my television. I can be sitting on my couch, think of a movie I want to watch, access Netflix on my Blackberry, and minutes later have that movie magically appear on my TV via my cool DVD player. I paid good money for this DVD player. Keep that in mind.

So I decided to watch the movie Step Brothers, which was already in my online movie queue. The first thing I did was turn on the TV and DVD player. So far so good. But then, when I tried to access Netflix, a message popped up telling me that "new Firmware was available," and did I want to download an update? I don't know what Firmware is, but I figured if it was new and would improve my system, I should get it. I clicked "OK."

The Firmware started downloading. After three minutes, it had downloaded 0%. Growing impatient and wondering why the DVD player couldn't just do this updating on its own, when I didn't want to use it to watch a movie, I clicked "Cancel." It canceled the download.

When I tried to go back to Netflix, the remote stopped working. I jabbed it at the screen several times, pushing all sorts of buttons to try and elicit a reaction, but got no response. I was stuck.

I did the resquisite tapping of the remote against my palm, the obligatory taking of the batteries out and putting of them back in, but still no reaction. At this point I was muttering under my breath. Cartoonish, Elmer Fuddisms like "razzmatazz" and "sassafrassin'."

Then I remembered I had shrewdly planned ahead for just such an occurance and bought a pack of batteries at the store the other day. I congratulated myself on my foresight and started taking the old batteries out of the remote again to be replaced.

I got the first one out, but the second one was stuck. Just wouldn't come out, the stubborn little bugger. I sat there, brainlessly picking at it with my fingernail for a good 90 seconds before abruptly shouting out "GodDAMMIT!!!" to the empty room, got up, stormed into the kitchen, got some scissors and pried the battery the hell out of there.

I went into the other room and got the new batteries, only to realize I had purchased 24 AA's, when in fact what I needed were two AAA's.

Uttering my loudest sigh of the day, hoping God might finally hear my annoyance, I found a different remote with the same sized batteries and pilfered them, trading them into the DVD remote. Full success! I was able to use the DVD player again like it was 1998. I clciked on Step Brothers, and it started downloading.

Very.........slowly.

I waited just under another 1o minutes, when after 95% of the downlaod was complete, a popup message broke the unfortunate news that there had been a Network Error. "Download Failed."

So ended my night, after roughly a half hour of wasted life.

Why can't things just work? Why does technology actually end up deproving my life instead of improving it more often than not? I never had this problem with my Betamax player.