48 hours

 I rented a movie on Amazon Prime last week. It’s a nice service. You don’t have to go to the video rental store – it’s all right there in your TV. I thought I read where, when you rent a movie from them, you get it for 30 days. So, I could watch it Monday, and, if I liked it, I could recommend it to a family member to watch sometime next week.

Well, it doesn’t quite work like that. I was correct in that, yes, you can rent the movie for 30 days. However, if you watch it, you only get it for 48 hours. Wait. What? Why would I rent a movie if I wasn’t going to watch it for a month? Can anyone make sense out of that? The only thing I could figure out is that this gives you time to go out and read the book or the play first, so you can familiarize yourself with the plot.

Good for Amazon for encouraging us to actually read something and not just sit home and watch movies. But they’ve encouraged me to read something else: the fine print.