tired

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/3ooUoi0

i’ve been plugging away on this 20-tape VHS order. [we digitize analog media at the camera store. people bring us their old tapes and movies and shit. mostly home movies, stuff people shot on camcorders etc. also film stuff. slides. whatnot. mostly i find the work rewarding, but it’s also often real boring.] Most of them are like, family shit.

this order, clearly these people had a camcorder that took full size VHS tapes. great! so there’s lots of Little Suzie’s First Steps kinda shit, which is great. Also lots of Lil Suzie’s First Concert, which is less great because I leave the sound on so I know when the tape ends, but like. whatever. i’ll live.

but also these tapes fit in the VCR, so a bunch of them… well, these people liked Law & Order.

One tape I left running for like 45 min and was finally like okay they don’t want this, this is just The Price Is Right and shit. I was about to turn it off when it fuzzed out and was–

Little Suzie’s Third Birthday.

oh my god someone taped over the first 45 minutes of Little Suzie’s Third Birthday.

So the next time it happened i let it go the whole time. Now this is labor-intensive shit, I have to let it run realtime the whole time so a two-hour tape really takes up two hours of the machine, but then I also have to run it through an editing process to strip out the dead space and recompress it to something your computer will want to play, and that usually takes another like 20 minutes or so.

I’m just now finally burning the DVD and I’ve just done the final editing pass and hit the button and I’m realizing… no, this one is ENTIRELY Law & Order and an epsiode of the West Wing. Fuck.

Well, I’m giving it to them, because I did all the work, because I fully expected at some point it was going to tick over and be Little Suzy’s First Horseback Riding Lesson or something, and if you want to bitch that you just paid twenty bucks for some old reruns, well, I just spent about three hours making those reruns into something you can watch on your computer, and I deserve to get paid for those three hours and it’s not my fault you taped over whatever touching family moment was supposed to be on there.

oh in other work news Plague Maiden never developed symptoms and all her tests came back negative and apparently there’d been four people in her house and one of the tested positive two days later but nobody else did so her ventilation system must either be boss or her sick friend wasn’t contagious yet. good for us, but i’m going to call her Plague Maiden forever. now maybe I can see my mother-not-law again and ask her how tf to make the really simple reliable sewing machine she gave me in working condition work, because I can’t get it to sew a single stitch and it’s driving me crazy. (Your picture was not posted)