In the distant past, I used to work with a guy with the heroically unlikely name of Waldemar. (One of the dwarfs in the Nibelungen, I believe.)

He surprised us all in the late 1970s by turning into an early technology adopter and  buying a Betamax video recorder when they were about the size of a small car and cost roughly 2 months’ salary.

Yoofnote: Betamax got beaten by VHS tapes (inferior image, better concept, better marketing) which were replaced by DVDs which were replaced by Bluray and now everything’s streamed

He used it primarily for recording soccer games while he was at work (we had a 70% late/night shift pattern at the time..) to watch the next morning and his catch phrase when he came in on night shift (and not knowing the result of the late games) was “Sag’s mir bitte nicht, sag’s mir bitte nicht” , holding his hands over his ears while we’d have the radio cranked up full and be prancing around in front of him mouthing the names of the teams and holding up the appropriate number (or not…) of fingers.

Distant past.

It’s not much different these days, though.

I’ve got a source for getting the day’s place summary of the cricket Test series between England and India.

Broadcast on Channel 5 in the UK at 7pm, I can get hold of them the next morning, which means that I have to avoid all UK websites for the duration of a match to avoid stumbling over the score and losing the element of surprise.

“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me….”