So my 71yo Mum is terrified of having a credit cards, even a prepaid one, but has tastes that run beyond what she can buy over the counter in the shops in the small town she lives in.

So requests of "can you help me find/buy XYZ..." are relatively common.

The latest object of desire was an entire box set of Inspector Morse DVDs. After determining nothing was available on TradeMe, in the spirit of blind optimism I turned to Fishpond and Mightyape. With the predictable result.

[Side note: These retailers' search algorithms are seriously broken. There's probably some corporate edict that forbids searches - any searches - turning up zero results, so they just populate the results with irrelevant crap if the item is not in the database]

Anyway, I looked on Amazon and sure enough, there they were. But the discs would be Zone 1. On the phone, in words designed for a 71yo technophobe to understand, I explained that I'd found a set but they might not play, and I would need her to do a small test.

I then explained that each DVD has on the back a little icon of a world, about half the size of a postage stamp, with a number printed on it, usually "4" - got her to grab a DVD from her stack and confirm she could see it. "It says 'PAL' underneath too, is that right?"

"Excellent! - Now I want you to find another disc, that instead of a 4 has something else, like '2' or '1' - just to see if it plays"

She finds a Zone 2 disc in her collection. Puts it on. It plays. Excellent. Her disc player is multi-region. Got her to repeat with the other disc player. Same result.

I ordered the discs on her behalf. They arrived quickly, and after sorting out the inevitable "The packaging says $96 so why did you ask me to reimburse you $155?" she put the DVDs into her player expectantly.

Bet you can't guess what happened next. Anyone?

Yep - "Wrong Region".

Rinse and repeat with the other DVD player.

Now we have two options. Either find some way to make both her DVD players accept out-of-zone discs, or else the slow and painful DVDshrink operation removing region coding for each of the 24 discs and writing them out to DVD-R

Cue the 90 km trip up the coast... I can feel it coming...

So how are YOU spending YOUR weekend then?