Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Changing of the Guard

In February of 2003 my husband came home with his birthday present and changed my life forever. Now if you know me and my husband it is glaringly obvious that this “present”, while in the disguise of his birthday present, was actually for me. Yep my husband is awesome like that. He came through the door with a brand new, sparkling, TiVo DVR. This was a revolution in the way you watched TV. Now, instead of rushing to put the kids to bed during commercials, I had all the time in the world. That pause button was like MAGIC!!! But WAIT you can set up season passes????? The TiVo magically recorded all my favorite shows for me to watch at my leisure. Could life get any better?

The TiVo and I bonded quickly. Very soon I had Brent up in the attic running a second cable so that my fancy new toy could record 2 shows at once!!!! Crazy talk!!!! And so went our lives. Every time we moved (and there were several over the next few years) the last thing to be unhooked was my TiVo. It was the very first thing to be plugged in at our new house and Brent would be back up in the attic running that second cable for my TiVo. My point in telling you all this (despite the fact that you will realize the level of my craziness) is so that you will understand how attached I am to my TiVo. This machine and I have been together for 7 ½ years. During the good times and the bad it was always there waiting for me. Holding all the things that made me happy and NEVER forgetting a single show. We were a team.

So, you can imagine my horror when I started noticing “glitches” during the play back of some of my shows. Being the tuff cookie that I am I did the only logical thing………..I pretended it was a fluke. Nope, it’s not happening. There was a storm the night that show recorded that’s what the problem was, it will go away……..it didn’t. The glitches started to get worse. Brent started to notice the glitches and started to talk foolishly about my TiVo being on its last leg. “It is just fine” I told him. My TiVo and I were going to grow old together. Brent quietly began researching new DVR’s when he thought I wasn’t looking, but I knew what he was up to. He was going to take my TiVo on a long walk and not come home with it. NOT on my watch buddy!

Then it happened, the glitches started to take over, even during live TV. They got so bad that I could no longer deny that my time with my TiVo was coming to an end. I mourned. It actually hurt my heart to think about being parted from this friend that had been with me for so many years. It had kept me company when my husband had worked 6 years of graveyards. It had given me peace after long nights of sick babies. It had never let me down. Forget that my TiVo could only hold 35 hours of recorded shows at a time and this new DVR would hold 100 without breaking a sweat. Forget that instead of just the Standard Definition that my TiVo was capable of this new DVR would show me things in HD. While the upgrades were intriguing, I was saying goodbye to a friend. I actually cried.

The time had come, the new DVR was delivered and it was time for the “Changing of the Guard”. Brent, being the sweet and caring man that he is, was patient with me. He talked gently about the things that needed to happen as not to startle me into a complete meltdown. He moved through the changes slowly helping me to adjust to the idea. When Brent unplugged my TiVo for the last time, he handed it to me and I sat on my bed with it wrapped in my arms and a lump in my throat. He plugged in the new DVR and handed me the remote. A new era was about to begin.

I have started the moving on process. It bugs me that I don’t have the buttons on this new remote memorized. It bugs me that the menus are different and I can’t move through them as fast as I would like. It bugs me that I have to enter every single one of my 53 season passes back into this new DVR, but we are getting through it. We are slowly starting to understand each other and I know that in time we will be great friends. My TiVo still sits next to my bed; I’m not quite ready to send it away for good yet. I’m sure it won’t be long before Brent comes through and cleans it right out of our house but for now we are saying a slow goodbye. I hope it knows how much I love it. I hope that it was happy spending all those years with me. I will never forget my first TiVo, the way it changed my life and the happiness it gave me. RIP TiVo, you will be missed.

1 comment:

  1. Wow! Thanks for sharing! I had no idea there were 53 shows to watch out there. You are too cute! :)

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