If you suffer from chronic insomnia and nothing seems to help, don't worry, there's help for you — in the form of a 35-year-old word processor tutorial:
Late last year Randy Smith got a text from a complete stranger. She thanked him for putting her to sleep.
Smith was shocked to discover that he was a YouTube star. The Ormond Beach, Fla., retiree was even more surprised about why: A tutorial he recorded and sold as a VHS tape in 1989 on how to use Microsoft Word had resurfaced as 'THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE' with 3.1 million views and close to 11,000 comments so far.
"Most boring video ever made" might be a little strong. It's not that bad.
But I mean, it is pretty boring.
I mean, sure, it takes him nearly an hour just to get to text justification ...
And yes, we have to go all the way to the 1:15 mark to learn about page breaks...
But it was the 80s, man! Nobody knew any of this stuff!
Regardless of how "boring" the video is, it turns out that it's a great anxiolytic!
Smith, a former motivational speaker who taught presentation skills, has a voice that isn't so much boring as comforting. It turns out, his silky-smooth delivery, combined with the now-irrelevant subject matter, makes his video perfect — for hitting the sack.
As one insomniac put it:
I can't remember the number of times that this Video has helped me sleep ...
Learn about Microsoft Word v. 5.0 and get a good night's sleep: What's not to love?!
And if Mac SE instructional videos aren't your thing, you can always use a ... fake baseball game?
[I]nsomniacs these days can turn to a Chicago entrepreneur who calls himself 'Mr. King' and runs Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, a podcast of full-length but fake baseball games on the fictional WSLP AM. He calls the matches as sportscaster 'Wally McCarthy,' complete with made-up players and teams, and a friend from Minneapolis writes and narrates the ads for fictional products.
Whatever gets you to sleep, I guess!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
