 Who among us doesn't dream of making our own movie, especially now that digital video cameras and movie editing software are available to the hoi palloi? How hard can it be, right? You just point, shoot, and The Academy Awards here you come.
Ha! Nothing is ever that easy. Especially if your adventures in moviemaking involve installing new software, reading a manual longer than War & Peace despite a size 5 font, and having to deal with a tech support rep who gets confused when you pepper your conversation with movie references like, "I'm going to have to have to make you an offer you can't refuse" or "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
Let me be clear - I may not be Steven Spielberg or George Lucas when it comes to high tech movie-making, but I'm not completely out of the loop. Not only have I seen every movie made in the 80s (including Howard the Duck), I do have some high tech skills. I was a nerd as a kid and still have the pink belly to prove it.
Although I came into my nerdhood B.C. (before computers), I do okay. I Google, I IM, I text. Okay, I don't really text. But only because the buttons on my cell phone are too small for me to see without a magnifying glass, but I definitely could text if we went back to the old mobile phone I used to carry around in my car in case I needed to break out a window in an emergency. I can also Fax, TIVO, listen to an iPod and chew gum at the same time, take pictures with my digital camera as long as the light is perfect and I don't have to figure out how to turn the flash on, get my refrigerator to make ice on command, conference call, re-record my outgoing answering machine message, eBay, check my email from hotel computers, and replace the batteries in my combination smoke/carbon monoxide/Jehovah's Witness detector. What I can't do is get my movie off my camera and onto a DVD.
After six hours and two wine coolers, I got fed up with trying to follow the instruction manual that came with the moviemaking software. Page 12: "...this comedy of the people of Genoa and Lucca laying their petitions before Monsieur Buonaparte, and Monsieur Buonaparte sitting on a throne and granting the petitions of the nations? Adorable! It is enough to make one's head whirl! It is as if the whole world had gone crazy. Prince Andrew looked Anna Pavlovna straight in the face with a sarcastic smile. 'Dieu me la donne, gare a qui la touche!' I couldn't tell my Bonaparte from my touché, despite pictures."
Despite the cute little icons of happy movies being made, the text was Russian to me. I gave in and called tech support. (Let's just gloss over the part where I had to whip out my credit card and spend $29.95 for the right to talk to anyone. In order to get my money's worth, I was half-hoping someone would pick up the phone and breathlessly ask me what I was wearing. No such luck.)
I spoke to "Johnny," not his real name unless I miss my guess. He was very nice and informed me that my manual, the one packed in the box with my video camera, was of no use to anyone. Not even Tolstoy. He gave me the old "It's not you, it's the translators" speech. I think. I had to interrupt him every third or fourth word and politely say, "I just don't understand what you're saying. It's not your fault. It's not my fault either. We just come from different cultures. I'm not blaming you for the outsourcing of American jobs, either." I did feel better after our conversation. Not $29.95 better, but maybe $3.17 better. Johnny then e-mailed me a 20-page manual he said would take care of the problem, 100%. That's what he said, 100% guarantee my problem would be solved by printing out and reading the new, improved manual.
Silly man. Didn't he realize that I now had his email address? Because of course the manual did not solve my problems. I am a software debugger's dream. In my sleep I can generate error messages no one else has ever seen. "Error #666#!%*!~: The program you are attempting to use has not actually been developed yet and when it does see the light of day, you won't have enough real or virtual memory to use it. In fact, just to make sure you don't try, we are now destroying your hard drive through USB port #2. Thank you very much and have a good day."
I was very tempted to send Johnny a nasty e-mail telling him just what I thought about his company and their product and confessing that yes I did blame him for outsourcing as well as for my curry allergy. But instead I decided to give the problem another try by myself. And what do you know, I found a partial solution. I managed to get the movie off my camera and onto my toaster. I can watch it by popping in a bagel. It is kind of inconvenient, especially since I haven't been able to TIVO the toaster, but it beats gathering my friends around the tiny little screen on the camcorder itself. Plus there's bagels. I'd like to see Spielberg do that.
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Quirkee Voices 
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