Cable Box Catastrophe

There are fewer things more devastating these days than a broken cable box. Devastating, I say.

Maybe it’s cause TV shows are so much better than they used to be (certain 80s and 90s gems aside). Or because there are so many of them, what with hundreds of channels to choose from. Quality and quantity, I say! (Jersey Shore I must exclude.)

Not only is there a plethora of genres, but in 2010 we actually have a way to record all of them - sans tapes! (I do kinda miss watching TGIF on video though!)

Why was the evolution of digital recording so goddamn long in the making? How oh how did we subsist solely on videotapes and VCRs until the late 90s? Incomprehensible. Unbelievable.

It truly baffles my 2.010 brain.

Me and my digital video recorder have a very intense relationship. Think Miranda and TiVo. But instead of SteVo, my main squeeze is Buddy the DVR.

And lately Buddy Boy’s been a horrifically horrendous boyfriend.

It all started 6 months ago. Buddy Boy 1.0 kept shutting off in the middle of a show! I pretty much had panic attacks and cried on a daily basis leading up to...the inevitable.

You see, we’d just gotten super serious super fast and I didn’t know how I would survive without him! I thought he was the best thing since barbeque sauce. He let me record as many shows and movies as I wanted and even allowed me to fast-forward through commercials!

Such a dreamboat! Sigh.

But the inevitable was, well, inevitable, and I knew the time had come to call Time Warner...after my sobs had subsided, obvi. They confirmed my worst nightmare - that all of my recorded shows, my series manager info, my saved movies would be - gasp - deleted. For good. Any hope for a saving/retrieval miracle was dashed on the spot.

I weighed the pros and cons and felt, in the end, that I simply couldn’t have Buddy 1.0 shutting down in the middle of Mad Men. So I did the right thing. Little did I know that there are worse things that having to reboot.

Buddy 1.1 was a deadbeat from the get-go. 


As soon as Groucho Marx aka Time-Warner-Cable-Dude left, I ripped the plastic off the face of my “new” cable box, Christmas morning! The anticipation, the glee, the hundreds of channels foaming at the mouth for me to watch them - all in that little grey square. Yipeeeee!

Then I noticed that the bulbs on the clock were busted. Ew! Malfunctioning minutes after inception? Really? Read: Refurbished. Read: Pissed.

Buddy Boy 1.1 sucks. I haven’t gotten over the fact that my main source of time-telling is wonky. I always mistake 4’s for 9’s and stub a few toes in my mad dash to get out the door - that’s 5 whole minutes of life based on lies!

But what’s really been irking the shit out of me is that the cable itself has been wonky. Like, malfunctioning. Especially my On Demand!

Oh I’m sorry, no I actually don’t want to see streaky, jumbled up pixels when Dexter’s walking into his bathroom (devastating!), or when Alex walks in on Belle doing it, or when Jake (how amazing is this picture) awkwardly has awkward conversations with awkward girls (hellooooo Michelle).

I do.not.appreciate the garbled, futuristic, computer chip sound-effects occurring onscreen in lieu of dialogue. The skipping over of scenes. The sporadic pauses. The “Searching for Signals”.

I don’t like my TV looking like one of those paintings made up of a million little pictures. I’d like to see McDreamy clearly...and hear him too, thankyouverymuch.

Why have you failed me Buddy Boy 1.1. What did I ever do to you? I’ve been nothing but nice. I decorated you with doilies and even left you some breather space - I know how you despise that DVD player being stowed on top of you.

And while you have recorded nearly everything I ask (though I hate you for not being able to record more than one thing...and for not letting me watch On Demand while you’re recording two shows), you deem it necessary to go kaput on me. AWOL.

Allow me to let you in on a little secret, cable box: You are not a satellite dish. You cannot come in and go out as you please.

Shape up, yo, or I’ll ship you out!

(Oh wait that’s a lie - I think I’d rather deal with chopped up people and squeaky computer virus voices than risk losing my long-saved Season 2 of Mad Men...ahh what’s a girl to do? Sad face.)