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I’ll never forget the day my collection of VHS tapes became obsolete. I was just thirteen years old and I thought the world was over. In truth I only had about twenty videos and it wasn’t the end of the world, but it seemed like a lot back then.

DVDs were the most evil creation of all time. They killed the videotape, my videotapes. Time is a great healer, and by the time I was 18 I had finally embraced digital versatile discs. For the first time in my life I could see why having films on discs was so much better than video tapes. They’re rounder! With a steady income I acquired a collection of DVDs which put my pathetic videos to shame. “This is it!” I told my friends “They won’t top this. DVDs for life, my friends. DVDs for life.” How naive I was.

I had over five hundred DVDs and all of a sudden they brought out HD and Blu-Ray.

“This’ll be the end of me” I told Cathy. I had a choice to make. I wouldn’t be left with a pile of obsolete DVDs on my hands. I had to upgrade to the next generation, but which format would survive the world? There was no way that Blu-Ray was going to make it with a name like that, and so, I replaced every single one of my DVDs with HD. Sadly something happened which nobody could have predicted; Blu-Ray won.
Ten years later we’d been through over forty different formats, even going back to VHS for a week in May 2016 for David Beckham’s birthday.

Finally a company decided that things had gone too far, of course that company was LG who had decades of guilt to rid themselves of for year upon year of putting out poorly constructed electronics. It was a video player filled with miniature black holes, wormholes and flux capacitors. The machine was designed to anticipate developments in the market and automatically become the next generation machine years before the technology had even been conceived. They said it was the last machine you’d ever need, but there were catches; it cost £250,000 and wasn’t backwards compatible, and so it could only play future films.

Of course I bought one, and much to Cathy’s disliking I had to sell the house to pay for it.
“But it’s like it was built just to solve every problem in my life” I told her.

The day after I bought it I sat myself on the sofa and flicked over to Pepsi-BBC News. I began to think about how my life could never go wrong again. In front of me was a machine which would never become obsolete, because as soon as it was about made obsolete by a better machine it would become that machine. A smile crossed my face. I was content. Then a headline flashed up on the screen; “Everyone in the movie business quits to pursue other things”. And another film was never made again.

Michael, Chester.