MIL and FIL were all worried about us being intercultural – “You come from different cultures! Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah…” Well, what they really should have been worried about for our marriage was electronics. That’s where the big arguments are, baby.  Who needs to worry about intercultural divisiveness when you have a DVD player to argue about?

Our DVD player (a Toshiba) is about 5 years old (give or take). It drives me bananas – it won’t play certain DVDs! Sometimes, you pop a disc in and it just won’t play. Other times, you get started on a video just enough to get you hooked and it stops playing. Other times, it just skips through 15-20 minute segments entirely, so your 2 hour movie lasts approximately 45 minutes and you’re kind of sketchy on the plot line. Nothing works to fix it (including banging on the machine) – and it’s totally random.

I have been complaining about this piece of crap player from the first time is didn’t play a disc – Murder by Numbers. I thought it was a fluke until Cinderella – it will play the bonus features disc, but not the movie disc. They there was The Village, and Troy, and many, many, many other DVDs never to be seen on our TV. The last straw though was my Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The thing won’t play Seasons 6 or 7 – AT ALL – not any of the discs in those 2 seasons (Seasons 1-5 are fine – go figure).

I wanted a new DVD player – I didn’t care if it was some $30 no name brand from Big Lots. I just wanted a player that would work, but apparently I wasn’t saying it the right way, or I appeared vague somehow in my ranting about how I HATE our DVD player. I made references to throwing it out the window, to no avail. At any rate, I didn’t demand we go out and buy one (I’m sure I was talking like a girl, expecting him to figure out that I was reaching my boiling point by the cursing and red face instead of just saying what I wanted – thought I thought I really had). Saresh said we’d borrow his mom and dad’s player so I can watch Buffy. I calmed down again by this temporary solution, as their player did play my discs.

BUT (there’s always a “but” in this story), I get halfway through Season 7 and the little monster ATE one of my discs. Four whole episodes of the last season are stuck in this blasted machine. It just stopped working. Saresh came home to find me with a screwdriver ready to dismantle it to rescue my disc. He doesn’t want me to do this, but I told him that DVD is worth more than the player and it won’t work anyway. He tries, can’t get it to work, and succumbs to my idea of autopsy. We did rescue the disc, but had to return MIL and FIL’s player to them in pieces. Now that I’d broken the in-law’s player, we were back to crappy old Toshiba, which seemed to be worse than ever.

At Easter, my mom bought Enchanted for DD. The Saturday night before Easter morning we were going to watch it. Mom had made a blackberry pie and we were all settled in with our hot pie and ice cream, lights off, DVD in and… you guessed it. That was it – the player finally broke me. I popped up and things kind of went like this:

Me: “I’m going to buy a new DVD player.”

Saresh: “Now????”

Me: “Yes, NOW. I’ve had it with this player. I’m going to the store.”

Saresh: “Now???? Let me just see…”

Me: “No – you can’t fix it, and even if you somehow got it to start playing it will just stop in the middle of the movie. I just want a player that will play my DVDs!”

My mom and sister are watching us like a ping pong match. DD is standing there going, “Aren’t we going to watch the movie?” Finally, my sister says (as if she thinks this is all normal), “Well if you’re going, I’ll drive you.” Saresh says to wait, we argue some more and –

“It’s not a good time to buy a DVD player. What about Blu-ray? You can’t get an old player now!”

Me: “Uh – yes I can. I’ll get a cheap one – I don’t care.”

Saresh: “Let me look on Consumer Reports…”

I’ll save you the boring details of the CR report and just say that my sister and I left. I ranted in the car because I can tell he’s pissed at me, but I was going to watch Enchanted that night if it killed me. Who cared if it’s 8:30 by the time we got home and all 5 of us had to be up and ready for church by 8 am! Who cared if no one else wanted to even watch the movie anymore! I realized I had left the land of rationality far behind me at that point, but I wasn’t to be deterred.

Saresh called us 2 times in Circuit City, both calls ending in me cutting off conversation with, “I just want a DVD player that plays my discs!” I scared a teenage boy working at Circuit City – I probably looked like Cruella DeVille on a rampage to get Dalmatian puppies. I got a nice Sony 1-disc player for $60 (which Saresh pointed out was twice my original budget of $30, but he told me not to get an off brand!), took it home, hooked it up and we watched Enchanted.

My sister and mother proceeded to make fun of me behind my back (very mature) because they think I’m a raving lunatic. Never mind that Mom gave me the $60 to buy it (she’s the poster child for enablers) and Sister volunteered to drive – neither said anything like, “Calm down” or “It’s okay – we’ll watch something else.” So, Saresh is ticked at them for making fun of me (and I thank him for that!), and he’s ticked at me because I didn’t consult him and we didn’t talk about it – I just went out and bought a player (something I assure you I never do – well, maybe once every 10 years or so). We didn’t speak to each other the rest of the night.

After mom and sister leave, we finally talk rationally about the DVD player and how to avoid these kinds of blow-ups in the future. However, I can’t say I regret my moment of irrationality, as I’ve happily been able to watch any disc I want. Of course, now I have to live forever with a family story of the night CBC flipped out and bought a DVD player and made everyone stay up until 11 to watch Enchanted (which was very good, by the way).

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Epilogue (yes, there’s actually more to this ridiculous story):

One of Saresh’s arguments against buying a new DVD player was that “they all do these kinds of things” (i.e. get all funky and don’t play your discs). I don’t buy this, but he seemed to believe it. So even though we’d talked the DVD blow-up out, I think he was still waiting for that “I told you so!” moment. His first complaint was that this player didn’t have a particular sound feature the other one did – I looked through the manual and found it. Then one night, Charlotte’s Web didn’t play. He says from the other room in a self-satisfied-I-told-you-so-voice, “I’ve got bad news for you. It’s started skipping.”

DD always wants to put the videos in herself, so I suspect this has more to do with sticky toddler fingers than the DVD player. So I take the disc out and sure enough, there is some kind of goo stuck all over the playing side of the disc. I wash it and the disc plays just fine. I think he was actually disappointed.

He seems to be begrudgingly coming to like this player though, being all reliable as it is and having new-fangled features (a boon to any man). I actually heard him make a snide comment about our old player the other day.