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A New (Ti)Vocation

Up front — it’s not about the Braves (mostly), but it’s still a piece of mine at Bugs & Cranks:

The Replaceables: NL Edition — Who’s the overpaid stiff on your favorite National League team?

Find out that, and then find out whatever the hell follows below. Should be fun.

I don’t want to say anything bad about my TiVo. After all, TiVo has changed the way I watch television. There’s no need now for me to surf channels endlessly, or to get stuck watching Bosom Buddies rerun marathons at three in the morning any more.

“Sometimes, even TiVo can’t save me from myself. Or from Donna Dixon.”

I’m not saying I don’t do that. I’m just saying there’s no need now. Sometimes, even TiVo can’t save me from myself. Or from Donna Dixon.

At any rate, I’ve always been a big TiVo fan — even before I had one. And when my wife and I finally bought our Tivo, it was heavenly. Our favorite shows were always on. Cable movies lined up in the viewing queue. Sweet, sweet Skinemax porn was available around the clock.

(Nah, not really. We’ve only got HBO. So the closest we get to hot softcore is a three-second glimpse of somebody’s grimy wild western ass on Deadwood. And not in a good way.)

Eventually, though, that ‘regular’ TiVo broke down, skipping and sputtering its way to the trash bin. And while forty hours of TiVo is good, they say more is better. So I bought a cheap refurbished unit with a two hundred hour hard drive. And life took a turn again.

Not for the worse; not for the better. But for the different.

Now, we have literally more than a week’s worth of space for Simpsons nad South Park and Law and Order: SVU. So I told the TiVo to tape those.

Also, The Office. And Good Eats And three kinds of CSI. And one hundred and three other shows, on thirty different channels.

And it’s still not enough.

Now, the TiVo never stops taping. Turn on the television on a weekday or weekend — morning, noon, or night — and something’s being saved. And it stays on the hard drive forever. There’s so fricking much space, shows almost never get deleted. But they eventually do, and I’m obligated to watch them before they’re gone. It’s a lot of pressure.

So now my life is spent managing my show list. If I’ve seen a show — or my wife has seen it, or the dog has watched it, or any of us ever read a newspaper article about it — then we can safely nuke it. Otherwise, I have to watch it. Before it goes away. And there are seventy-three shows a night expiring now. So I’m constantly watching TiVoed shows now. It’s like an extra, unpaid, after-hours, compulsive job now. Dammit.

I used to say TiVo means ‘you don’t watch TV more, you watch TV better‘. I still believe that.

But a two hundred hour TiVo means you watch TV better — AND you watch TV more. But mostly more. At three in the morning, when you’re supposed to be sleeping. But Buffy the Vampire Slayer is getting deleted in an hour, and you can’t get any rest thinking about missing an episode of your forty-ninth favorite show, give or take a Seinfeld.

Anyway, you get the point. And I’ve got three News Radios and an According to Jim to watch before midnight. I’ll catch you kids later. Maybe during a commercial break.

For the love of god, somebody help me.