Old electronics continue to pile up in my hallway ready to make their final journey to the dump (though according to the website things will get recycled so these are more like organs for transplant than landfill, thus this is a good thing). It still feels wrong throwing stuff away, especially when it possibly still works, but I think it'll be too much trouble to find good homes for all of this stuff and I don't have time to hook it all together and see what functions. The man at the dump might be able to make a bit of money out of it I suppose and I don't mind that one bit.
But I made a small effort to rehouse one item today, partly because I know there's nothing wrong with it and partly because it's such redundant technology that I thought it would be fun to see if anyone needed it. I bought a fax machine in 2003, thinking it might be a useful way to get last minute scripts to people. It's hard to believe that in 2003 email was not sufficiently established to do this already, but either it wasn't or I didn't realise that it was, or I was perhaps thinking of the times that contracts needed to be physically signed. I honestly don't know what was going through my stupid head, but I was certainly not capable of looking into the near future and seeing that this was a WASTE OF MONEY. I set up a dedicated phone line in my office, which annoyingly turned out to be a number that had previously been used for someone else's fax because every night I would get pages of spam fax adverts coming through, using up my paper and printer ink. I am not convinced I ever used the fax machine for anything else or that I received a fax that was not an attempt to sell me something. I turned the fax machine off to avoid this spam and then after a few months (and the arrival of a wireless router) had no need for the phone line in my office. And the fax machine sat in the same place until a few days ago when I removed it to the landing.
Now I know how useless a fax machine has become in the modern world, because of my own experience, but it seemed wrong to dump this when I knew it worked and was practically unused (I even have a spare printer cartridge for it) and I thought it would be funny to act as a modern day Bagpuss so I tweeted that if anyone wanted a fax machine and could make it to West London then they could have mine. I got the expected jokey remarks about obsolescence and whether I was able to fax details of the machine to people and that people wanted it to contact the 1980s, but eventually a few actual requests came through, all in a clump and acting on the eternal law of first come first served, I arranged to meet up with a lady called Fran at Shepherd's Bush tube station tomorrow to make the handover. Apparently it is something she is required to have for her work (perhaps she is a time traveller from the 1980s) so she was delighted and I was pleased to, because although it would mildly inconvenience both of our days (she lives on the other side of town), at least I had saved a tiny bit of landfill space (for a few years at least - and I suppose if she hadn't got this machine she'd have got another, and that other one will end up in landfill, but... oh fuck it, it's a nice thing to do). I was conscious that I was dealing with a stranger - it might be one of those twats on Twitter who think it's funny to be rude or prank people - I might turn up tomorrow to find no one waiting (though if that happened, I made it clear that I would put the fax machine by the bin and leave), it might be a mad person ready to bundle me into a van or cleave my head in two with an axe - though again if anyone wants to do those things then there are plenty of opportunities - I do list where I am going to go in my gig guide (I say that not to offer advice to any Misery style kidnappers of minor celebrity serial killers, just to say that if anyone wanted to do those things there are opportunities without the fax machine sting). But I hoped that it was worth trusting that most human beings are quite nice and good, as she was trusting me after all (though she did point out that her boyfriend would be with her to help her "carry" the machine and presumably fight me off if this turned out to be some kind of fax machine based honey trap - I almost wish it was, that would be such an unlikely choice of bait to lure women into the lawless boundaries of Shepherd's Bush). Hopefully we will both turn up at the appointed time and my neglected fax machine might finally see some non-advert based action. It it even works.
Tonight we watched "Burke and Hare", which is a film that just goes to show that you can have the best director and brilliant actors (a couple of dodgy accents aside), a big budget and star cameos, but if you have a shitty script then it's not worth turning up. It's quite a wonder to see how these amazingly funny people can get next to no laughs if they don't have the lines to deliver and the slapstick is pretty desperate. On the plus side it did make me look up the actual historical story, which is fascinating, though made me more convinced that a fairly light comedy with mild dark bits was the wrong way to go with this. I would much rather see the League of Gentleman's version of this, Reece Shearsmith was in this, but rather wasted as a guardsman who had little to do. It was a bit of Spaced reunion too (though no Nick Frost - think he'd have been a lot better than Andy Serkis who is a great actor, but not convinced about him in comedies), which probably only heightened the lack of laughs. Michael Smiley did a great job, I thought and managed to avoid the mugging that everyone else was forced to resort to. But most disappointing and the all female Macbeth subplot was an odd addition. Don't watch it. It's no "Run Fatboy Run". (Tragically it really isn't).
