VCR clocks

[P3D Marvin Jones <72657.3276@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>If I might venture a different opinion, perhaps it's a reflection on the
>designers of many VCRs that 1) clocks should have battery backup or large
>capacitors to protect them during the inevitable power failures; 2) the
>clocks are too difficult and non-intuitive to reset.

At the risk of keeping alive this non-3D topic, my original point, which seems
to have been confirmed by subsequent discussion here, is not that setting a VCR
clock is difficult, but that everyone THINKS it is so difficult that they don't
even try to do it. I've seen a lot of VCRs in my day, but never one whose clock
could not be easily set. However, for years we have been inundated by comedians'
jokes by the thousand (from Johnny Carson especially) about how impossible it is
to set the clocks. It's a classic propaganda technique called "the big lie" that
if something is repeated often enough, no matter how observably wrong, people
will come to accept it as truth. A few years ago I took an informal poll at an
office I was working with, and found 50 people (out of about 65 polled) whose
VCR clocks were flashing. When asked, every single one admitted that they had
never even once attempted to set their clocks because they simply "knew" that
doing so was far beyond their abilities!


------------------------------