Suffering From Redbox Angst

When I woke up this morning I realized the Redbox thing was bothering me. My daughter had acquired Oz the Great and Powerful from one of these red things you find beside 7-Eleven s (no not rednecks, although you find a lot of them there too).

That was about two weeks ago and Redbox charge $1 for every night. I calculated we had already been charged as much as it would have cost to see the thing at the movies, although maybe not in 3D.

"So where is it? Has it gone back?"

"No. I've lost the box."

"Great what's the point of Redbox without the box?"

I don't even know if the box is red or whether that just describes the box that contains the DVDs which you can find outside various places resembling those red boxes in Britain that are used to urinate in.

By this point I am becoming nostalgic for the days of Blockbuster when you could deal with a human being and get a big bag of M&Ms while you were there.

"Can you return it without the box?"

A shrug of the shoulders.

Eventually we located Oz the Great and Powerful cowering in a drawer and headed for 7-Eleven. We experimented with dropping the boxless DVD into a slot which was clearly intended for boxes. It got stuck at the top and there was an error message. The conviction that I was making a serious mistake hit me and I desperately tried to prize it out. The edges kept slipping from my fingers. What if you needed the box for it to register that you had returned it? Would Redbox - which was set up by McDonalds destroy my personal finances to the extent on which I would have to live on Big Macs for the next 20 years?

Redbox - it won't take you back in time

In the end the decision was made for me. The DVD dropped into the slot and disappeared out of sight. The usual reassuring message about returning your video did not show up either.

On the positive side a giant finger did not appear on the screen either informing me I would be screwed over.

On reaching work Redbox angst overcame me. I checked out various sites including Redbox is a whore by Ben Liebing.

I checked the Redbox rebuttal by Jeremiah Regan. Nobody told me if it was a sin to drop a naked DVD into the box. On the positive side I read somewhere there's a maximum charge, so maybe I should have kept the DVD. Still it's hard not to be consumed by Redbox angst.

In other developments hundreds of people have been killed in Egypt.