Monday, April 11, 2022

Random Story – Trying to explode my VCR

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Twenty-fiveish years ago, one of my guilty pleasures was reading the Weekly World News.  I didn’t believe any of the stories, and just laughed at the idea that there were people out there that probably did believe all that shit.  But I felt safe knowing those people would only be on the fringe of society and they’d never … I don’t know … be elected to Congress. 

Anyway, sometime in 1998 or 1999, there was an article about Y2K.  Now the normal fear was that going from 19-- years to 20-- years would cause computers to crash.  But this article claimed that things would be far worse and that any electronic device would explode at midnight. 

I don’t know if shortly before or after I read this article we had a power outage and I had to reset the time on my VCR.  So I performed an experiment.  I set the time on my VCR to 11:59 PM on December 31, 1999.  I then backed away and waited.  A minute later the display switched over to 12:00.  There was no smoke, or buzzing, or anything.  And when I checked the date, it was January 1, 2000.  I guess I had a “modern” VCR that replaced the explosive parts with the memory to have a four digit date. 


I was only slightly bummed.

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