Technology - who needs it anyway?

Technology is letting me down. Where are the good olde days when you bought a bit of electronics - like a telly or a fridge - and it lasted for twenty years? Our previous TV lasted about seven years - think about, seven years for a wide screen TV that was quite expensive in the first place. When I explained the symptoms to the repairman, he just said that the tube was out, and replacing the tube was so expensive it was just better to buy a new telly. So we got a new telly last August.

Now it looks like the DVD player is on it's way out too - and that's only four years old. It still plays DVDs, but lately has been refusing to play VCDs: when watching Backlash last night (which, incidentally I would have ordered on PPV - but our digital cable box remote control is also broken, so I couldn't enter the PIN code to verify the order - so I didn't) the first VCD played after re-inserting the disk once, the second disk played after about 5 re-tries and the third only played after about 15 re-tries. I'm going to call couple of repairers to see if it can be fixed, of course. It was a bloody expensive player too when I bought it - at a time when Tesco's "50 quid for a multi-region player" offers didn't exist.