You Don't Know What You've Got 'Till It's Gone

Yesterday, tragedy struck the home of the Crafty Southpaw. I'm still a little shaken by the whole ordeal and you should know that it's a little difficult to talk about it. But being a blogger, whose blog has been viewed literally DOZENS of times over the months, carries with it a certain responsibility and I will not shirk my duty to my readers, both of whom are quite loyal. So here goes:

My TiVo died yesterday.

Oh sure - I thought it was a simple matter of the batteries in my remote dying. I conveniently neglected to remember that the same remote turned my television on without so much as a second thought. But I bravely changed them anyway - and lo and behold, the same nothing that happened before was still not happening now.

This was my first indicator of any real trouble.

The next step was, of course, a full system shutdown. After all, a TiVo is nothing but a computer - and this one had been running continuously for the better part of seven years with maybe two or three reboots. That's probably it, says I. No need to panic - not just yet.

So I flip the master switch and my entire entertainment console goes cold. I wait the magic three seconds that they tell you to wait and flip the switch back on.

TV: Springs to life. Cable Box: ditto. DVD, VCR: Check check.

TiVo? TiNo.

Ohhhh, shit.

How did this happen? How did I get so helplessly, hopelessly hooked on my TiVo? Why is it that now, the experience of watching TV seems to be so one-dimensional, kinda like...kinda like...well: In Kurt Vonnegut's brillant novel Slaughterhouse Five, he describes a friendly alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions - basically they can see all points of a time line at once - and they try to describe how humans experience life in terms of looking at life through a narrow tube, and only being able to see what the tube shows them at any one given time, as opposed to being exposed to the entire vista before them.

TiVo laid bare to me the entire vista of television, without regard to that pesky fourth dimension of time. If I sauntered downstairs at 6 or 10, on Tuesday or Sunday, I still had the same choices waiting for me when I got down there. Hmmm, a MythBusters I haven't seen yet? Promising. Oooh, how about some Poker After Dark (that airs at 2:05 AM, weekdays, on NBC...how would I ever have seen that otherwise?), or perhaps the Family Guy where Brian and Stewie find themsleves in Florida and have to get to Rhode Island...it's all there, just waiting for me, instead of the other way around.

In other words, as life should be.

Anyway, I shut everything else off so I could isolate the sounds that my TiVo was making, unplugged, waited, and plugged back in. And then I heard it: the unmistakable whirrr-clack whirrr-clack of a catastrophic hard drive failure.

Game over, man. But not the worst news in the world. Though I can't (actually, won't) go out and get a new one because the scumbags have eliminated the lifetime membership and now charge by month or by year for the privilege of suckling at the sweet teat of TiVo, I can get a replacement hard drive for it, which will provide me a fifteen-fold increase in capacity, without me having to buy a new membership.

So, to my family and friends, please forgive me if I seem a bit on edge for the next few days. I may show the standard withdrawal signs of fever, chills, and a constant desire to pore over the TV Guide. I'll get my fix soon enough, and then life can be swell again.