Chez Chesler

I've been carrying a VCR around in my trunk for a few months. It's an RCA with Commercial Advance. It no longer rewinds to the very beginning -- which means it never gets to the next step of marking the commercials. I've had it about three years. I bought the 2-year service plan and got it serviced twice at Circuit City; when I brought it back late last year they said it wasn't worth the bench charge to diagnose it. I got a Go Video dual-deck VCR as a replacement -- many bells and whistles, but their claim that it's like 2 VCRs in 1 isn't true, since it can only record from one channel at a time, and only the first deck has Commerical Advance. So it's like 1 great VCR in 1, with an auxiliary VCR attached. And if I put a 19" TV on top of it the case flexes and the buttons and ejection don't work. Today (that's what one is supposed to do in a blog, talk about today, right?) I brought it to McAndrew's TV Repair here in Billerica. And the technician -- who in the past repaired a VCR that others could not -- told me the same thing, that it's not worth repairing. It seems a shame to throw out something that new, that's still 85% functional.