Renting Movies

Troy and I have this funny little routine when it comes to renting movies. There is only one video store in our neighborhood. It’s called “House Movies” but I get the feeling they perhaps forgot “of” in between. Who knows. Maybe the store belongs to Greg House, M.D. Anyway, Troy is usually the one to go rent the movies. This is mainly because he takes the dog for her last walk at the same time. When HE takes her, she will wait quietly outside while he picks a movie. If I take her, she flails around like a dying fish and howls like a banshee almost the entire time I am in the establishment. I am not a big fan of said behavior.

After an appropriate interval of browsing the options, the obligatory phone call is made, wherein Mr. Cady asks me what I am in the mood to watch, and lists possibilities. House Movies does not have a great selection so it’s not like walking into Blockbuster and finding eleventy billion copies of all the movies you are dying to see. Sometimes I narrow it down for him, sometimes I leave him hanging and force him to make a decision. If I am on my game, when he calls, I answer “Movie hotline, how can I help you?” or some other tomfoolery.

Without fail, this is how the scenario ends. Troy comes home.

“What did you get?”

“I don’t know what it’s called in English.”

We have tried three methods of renting movies:

1. The old-fashioned way: through shops like Blockbuster.
2. Through a “cine-bank”: kind of like going to an ATM.
and
3. By mail-order.

My least favorite way of renting movies is by mail order. You rarely get what you want and when you do you have to wait a long time for it to come.

My favorite way is through a cine-bank. Heather and I used this method when we lived out in the ‘burbs because there was one just a short walk away.

But, when we moved into the city we could not find a cine-bank near us. So, we scouted out the nearest Blockbuster-type place, but that was pretty far away. So, we opted to rent by mail order. This was so disappointing that we now have settled on renting from a store, the old-fashioned way, even though the shop is a longish walk away.

The place we rent from is called House Movies. It is tiny, and very disorganized, and the owner seems to prefer horror movies, because that is what they have in greatest supply.

So, whenever I venture to House Movies, I take my mobile phone with me because almost every time I need to call Heather to either warn her about what I am planning to bring home or ask for her opinion. This has become a routine for us and, for some reason, she finds this rather amusing.