Salami, sandwiches and other sundries ‘on video’

Press, 27 November 1986, Page 6

Salami, sandwiches and other sundries ‘on video’

PA Invercargill Is your video acting up? Perhaps you should call in the repairman to check that it is free of salami.

The advent of the video family has brought with it extra work for service companies. It seems many youngsters may not know much about the technical innards of their parent’s toys, but they do know that slots are for putting things in. Sticky fingers have deposited into the cassette loading slots of videos in Invercargill a host of foreign objects. Salami, toast, and half a sandwich have been fed into machines.

A hygienically minded youngster who noticed a video was saying “ahhh" promptly stuck in a tooth-

Another stocked up a unit with a piece of coal. Sticky paper, money, watches, batteries, pen parts, key rings and combs all make an appearance.

A $3OO repair bill incurred by one set of parents would not have been sweetened by the fact that the damage was done by an inserted bottle of artificial sweetener.

One young couple thought they were being clever by hiding the cassettes away from their adventurous youngster, who had worked out the rudiments of using a video. Frustrated he turned to experimentation and inserted the remote control.

Tisco usually had to fish something out of a video

each week, a technician, Mr Kevin Jones, said. “The parents are usually quite amazed that there was something inside,” he said.

Liquid in the machines can also be a major problem — water is bad enough but other substances are worse. A ruined video on the shelf at Independent Television Services is testimony to that.

The owners had told the firm that liquid had got into it but had not been more specific, said a spokesman, Mr Keiren Turner.

Under the workshop test the video heated up and started to smell.

“At that stage we wondered what it was. The owners came clean. They had a bad dog.”