Wednesday, February 23, 2005
MY TIVO THINKS IT'S DEAD
It started around three weeks ago. Coronation Street was on, and Ken Barlow suddenly started talking a bit too fast. Just a glitch, we thought, and life carried on much as it had before.
Then, a few days later, a marathon catch-up session of The Bill was marred by a strange audio effect that rendered PC Dunbar's voice even huskier than normal, if you can imagine such a turn of events. There was whirring. There was clunking. There was grinding. It could mean only one thing.
TiVo was dying.
At first we refused to believe it. Our little silver PVR friend has been dutifully recording all the unmissable TV rubbish since this website was just a twinkle in someone's eye. He was flexible, remarkable, indefatigable. He set us free from the tyranny of the TV scheduler, and we loved him for it. How could he even think of leaving us?
Ignoring the problem didn't make it go away. Everyone's voices just kept getting faster and faster, until an episode of Holby City was indistinguishable from one of Alvin And The Chipmunks. Well, more so anyway. There was only one thing for it – we would have to conduct emergency surgery.
A new heart was ordered via the internet on Sunday, and we prayed that it would arrive in time. All the while, poor TiVo was getting sicker, to the extent that one member of our household couldn't bear to see his suffering any more, and – gasp! – decided to switch to the basic analogue signal.
Luckily, the replacement heart arrived last night. It was good and strong – 120gb this time, so capable of pumping three times as much crap TV into our lives. After some very delicate surgery, TiVo sprung back into life.
But something was different. He had forgotten all our season passes, for a start. He doesn't even know we like The Simpsons! In fact, it looks very much like Our TiVo Doesn't Even Think We're Gay Any More.
Hopefully, in time, we can teach him to love us all over again. In the meantime, we hope and pray that the old heart – still stuffed with such gems as last year's Eurovision Song Contest, some episodes of Terri McIntyre, and the video for Lauren Waterworth's line dancing masterpiece, The Show, will rest in peace.
We have buried it in the big pile of rubbish down the side of the sofa. It's what TiVo would have wanted.
By Paul :: Post link
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