Henrietta Hay's Column

My VCR died last week. In the ultimate scheme of things a VCR is fairly low on the list of items essential for living, but I had gotten used to having one. There aren't too many great TV shows, and according to Murphy's Law, if there happen to be two that I like on any one evening, they will both be at the same time.

So -- I ventured into the marketplace and bought a new VCR. Now there is a distinct difference between having it sitting on the shelf flashing its lights, and actually recording the shows you want to keep. I have sort of snickered at the jokes about having to get the six-year-old neighbor kid to come in and program your VCR, because adults couldn't figure out how to do it. I won't laugh again.

My old one -- VCR, not kid -- was eight years old and very easy to program. Any electronic idiot could do it. Of course it was built when the goal was to put out a machine that would tape one show while you were watching another, and not foul up either one. It just recorded and played back television shows and played rental videos. It would not wash the dishes or sort the laundry.

Today a VCR is an intricate machine, set up for complex functions that most of us will never use. And in order to create all those bells and whistles, they have to make it hard to do what you bought it for. A very nice technician installed it and spent lots of time pushing buttons and hooking up wires and explaining to me just how it works.

He was hardly out the door before I discovered that I couldn't even get the TV to work without more snow than falls on Vail Pass on a ski Sunday. I pushed every button on the two remote controls, and in every combination I could think of. But that many buttons allow for an infinite number of combinations. Finally, just before the evening news came on, "By George, I think I've got it," and there was a picture. Of course, I had no idea how I got it. And I certainly did not dare try to tape anything for fear of losing the TV picture.

Well, I finally tamed the beast -- sort of. I can now record and play back on it and it does produce a great picture. But the experience points out the perils of the electronic age. There is a basic compulsion in all electronic engineers' brains that forces them to make their product bigger and better and more complicated -- forever and ever. They don't know when to quit.

Computer programmers have the same brain wave pattern, but it is much stronger. As software for home computers becomes more and more complex it often loses its original purpose.

My word processing program is wonderful. It does what I want it to do and is easy to use. It has a spell-check and a thesaurus, which are very handy, and a grammar check, which is ridiculous. My only complaint is that it won't think for me, but that is still in the future. There have been two upgrades of this program, however, which I have been advised to avoid because they have too many gadgets and too many bugs and are much harder to use.

I had a fairly simple program once for keeping my bank account straight. Then I bought the upgrade, which will do everything but choose the investment of the day. Now I can't even balance my check book with it, so I put it on the shelf along with several other upgrades and went back to the simple one.

Kitchen gadget engineers are a little less aggressive. After more than ten years of hard service my toaster oven quit toasting this summer. I found a replacement, which had a plastic case instead of a steel one, but was otherwise identical to the old one. I was able to make toast the very first morning. Maybe they had Dilbert sitting in the front office.

Progress in the electronic world is a relative term.