Next to the elementary school our youngest daughter attends is an electronics repair shop. One day I stopped in lugging my large, heavy, broken Mitsubishi TV, 27" of glass surrounded by what felt like a ton of wood.
The guy behind the counter told me parts were unavailable, but he had some good news: a customer had left a 27" Zenith to be repaired and never picked it up, and I could have it for the $95 he'd spent in time and materials to repair it.
I jumped at the deal, but what was even better were the stories he told about some of his customers.
People, it seems, like to hide things in VCRs. Sex toys, for one. Drugs, for another. And if you think it would be embarrassing to have a technician remove a vibrator from a VCR, a bag of pot or cocaine would be more than embarrassing.
The first time the technicians found drugs in a customer's VCR, he said, they did the dutiful thing and called the police. The amount of time, trouble and paperwork it led to convinced them that in the future they'd just throw the drugs away and not bother calling the police, so that's what they've done ever since.
One day a very sexy woman brought in a VCR with a tape jammed in it. After she left the technicians removed the tape and then used that same tape to test the repaired VCR. It turned out to be home porn featuring the customer.
Being all male, the technicians made a copy of the tape for themselves, then packed up the original tape and VCR for the customer. When she picked it up, she asked if they'd viewed the tape after removing it from the VCR. No they hadn't, they assured her. "Too bad," she replied. "It was some of my best work."
But the better story was one that only involved the guy who was working the day I stopped in. (I'll call him Ed, because I can't remember his real name and he looked like an Ed.)
Ed, a nice Catholic boy, grew up and went to church on the east side of Baltimore. When he got out of school he moved to the western suburbs, 10-15 miles away from where he'd grown up. Consequently, he was a little surprised when a priest from his old church walked in the door carrying a VCR.
"Hello, Father________," said Ed, greeting the priest (whom he knew) by name. The priest suddenly got a funny look on his face. dropped the VCR on the counter, mumbled that there was "something jammed in it," and fled.
Ed opened up the VCR and found out why: yes, it was a porn tape jammed in the VCR, and the priest had, obviously, brought his VCR way across town to be repaired so no one would know him.
Oops.
Sadly, the death of the VCR and the rise of the DVD may mean the end to stories like these. Hopefully, even as you read this, there's an historical society working to preserve these moments of American history.
Although I know a certain priest who's hoping they aren't.
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