Freeze Frame

Earlier this week, while watching live tv on my Tivo, it froze.

Now because it was live tv, I assumed the problem was with the channel. In college, we used to lose signals on random stations all the time. I'll never forget this one time when one channel froze on this Clorox man like creature. He looked a lot like the kool aid guy bouncing along the street only he wasn't full of punch, he was full of detergent. (Incidentally kids, don't make the same mistake at home.) Screw Dawson's Creek. That was some REAL entertainment.

So in switching from live to prerecorded tv I discovered the awful truth- it was still happening. This is when I unplugged the tivo and plugged it back in. I wanted to assume the best. After all, people make mistakes all the time. Unfortunately machines can't plead the "we're only human" excuse, too.

After plugging it back in the deep freeze had stopped, now we had moved on to the "little engine that could phase". This is the time when you can watch prerecorded and live tv, but there were little hiccups in what you were watching. Somewhere deep inside there was a huge UH-OH trying to get out.

So I Googled tivo + freezing and everything I read supported the theory no news is good news. Then again, if you want to fulfill deep seeded doubts, the internet is a great place full of speculation to support any hunch. Considering it was at least working and the errors hadn't happened for very long at all, I made a mental note to have my boyfriend check it out just to make sure things were ok.

The next day when I got home after a long day of work and turned on my tivo I had a rebooting screen. Obviously it had tried to reboot all by itself and got stuck. So I had no choice but to unplug and reboot again. Still, nada. This is when I decided to accept defeat. I begrudingly unplugged the player indefinitely until my tivo could be checked out and hopefully my season passes and prerecorded programs could be salvaged.

Now it's Wednesday morning. Considering my tivo had some R & R over the night, I decided to plug it in one. last. time. This is when I got what is known to many tivo users as the dreaded, Green Screen of Death. In rare cases, resucitation is possible, but I would need the Grey's Anatomy crew to work hard on revival. But since those guys were stuck inside the tivo, the prognosis was not good.

Of course leaving the recorder on the recommended 3 hour period didn't do any good. While this doesn't mean the tivo is gone forever, it does mean I have to rebuild. Not only do I have to rebuild, this comes a mere year after I purchased the device in the first place!

So now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, or a tivo and a vcr. You get the picture, unless your tivo is stuck, too, that is. I've had my tivo long enough to know that a life without tivo for a television addict is simply not a life worth living. I mean VCR's are great "wingmans", but they aren't nearly as crisp, quick or impressive as the leading man, tivo. Sure, at the bar the VCR would get some numbers, but it's the tivo that would use it's photographic memory to remember to call the girl the next day and take her out by the end of the week.

So now, tivo now has me in their clutches. Of course I have to purchase a new hard drive and pronto, because once you go tivo, you never go back. Just trying to "coordinate" what to record when the last few days has been so tedious and antiquated. Thankfully this happened in between seasons when nearly all of my spring shows just wrapped up, while summer shows are yet to premiere.

See that tivo is always thinking. It even schedules it's breakdowns around my schedule. Now I ask you, who could give that up?