[russnewcomer]

This doesn't feel like an archive to me, it feels usable.

When I was 16, my parents got a new answering machine. My dad's recording of the message was yelling into the machine "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. Leave a message" It was aggressive. I re-recorded saying, not yelling, "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. We don't sign autographs, but you can leave us a message." He did not like that I re-recorded it. His father, however, loved it for some reason. (never could figure out what Grandpa found funny.)

20+ years later, when my sister got them a new answering machine (yes, you can still get new ones, my parents still have their landline), the message has now changed to "... we don't sign autographs or send texts, but you can leave us a message."

We also buy my dad VHS auto-rewinders whenever we see them at thrift stores.

[bombcar]

Grandpa may have been amused by the fact his son didn't like it.

[rdiddly]

Some stuff skips a generation!

[albert_e]

More questions than answers :)

Why autographs? Are your parents celebrities?

Why VHS rewinders (plural)? One is not enough?

[monknomo]

I think the joke is that his parents are not celebrities, and so they don't need to specify that they don't sign autographs

[russnewcomer]

:)

Not celebrities, but a little bit of whimsy makes life fun!

As far as rewinders, he has a huge collection of VHS cassettes and VHS decks, but they are all getting old, have already had a long usage when they get to him, and VHS is not a precise medium so not great condition in many cases. The part that usually fails is the motor, and so you have the rewinder to save the motor on the VHS deck. However, the rewinders are also usually low quality and old, and so what happens a lot is that the latches that hold them closed while the rewind fail because they were not great quality plastic (either in composition or design accuracy) that have been subjected to a lot of rattle during their lifetimes and then they break, and it is cheaper/more convenient/fairly environmentally friendly to buy them from thrift stores for ~$3 than to order a ‘new’ $20 one from Amazon/eBay.

Now, this of course leads to a lot more lines of questioning, but I think the answer of ‘because they don’t sign autographs’ is probably sufficient especially since this answer amuses me and is likely to be unseen.

[qup]

> Why VHS rewinders (plural)? One is not enough?

My father uses these to rewind some old VHS tapes he likes to study. They just don't last, is all.

He went through a bunch of VCRs before we were buying the rewinders, though.