Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

What I'd been fearing for a while now (in a distant, maybe that might happen in a couple more months, 'sometime' kind of way) actually happened last night, when I'd been lulled into a false sense of security by thinking that I'd figured out how to more or less cope with the problem.

My DVR had been freezing up more and more frequently, requiring a re-start and usually the deletion of whatever recording I'd been watching at the time of the freeze (because once it froze at a certain point it seemed to want to always freeze and shut down at that same point thereafter, even if I'd watched that recording several times before without mishap).

I was loath to replace the DVR, though, or try out some new satellite or cable service, because there was no way to transfer any of my saved programs from the memory of that DVR. They'd all be lost. My DVR had hostages, and it wasn't afraid to throw out a body now and then to show me it was serious.

I've therefore been making a point of trying to catch up on at least a few of the unwatched episodes of my favorite shows each weekend, recording some on my VCR while watching and deleting others, trying to diminish my potential losses if the darn DVR gave up the ghost entirely.

Last night, unexpectedly, 'sometime' became 'right now'.

My DVR froze (yet again) while I was playing back a recording, but when I unplugged it and then plugged it back in after 10 seconds as the people on the Dish Network help line had taught me to do, this time it didn't start up again. Instead, it informed me that there was something corrupted on the hard-drive of my DVR ('Corrupted? But I've never recorded anything x-rated, I swear!'), and that the ENTIRE CONTENTS would have to be wiped clean in order to re-start. Then it proceeded to wipe out in just a few seconds all of the 140 or so hours of programming that I'd saved to re-watch, or in far too many cases had been still looking forward to watching for the first time, sometime in the future.

Goodbye to the entire 5th season of Dr. Who, as well as the last couple of specials covering the final appearance of David Tennant's Tenth Doctor!

Farewell, my 3rd and 4th season episodes of Chuck!

Buh-bye, all three seasons/series of Torchwood!

And the list goes on, and on, and on.

Kiss it all bye-bye.

["Good-bye, God! I'm going to Missouri!" -- quoted from Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight".]

Now that the blinding rage and frustration has passed, somewhat ('I pay how much for this crappy service...?'), I'm trying to look at this as a . . . well, not exactly a blessing in disguise (I can't go that far), but at least an opportunity of sorts.

I'm somehow reminded of an old Remington Steele episode (2.03 "Red Holt Steele"), in which Laura Holt's house is blown up, along with all of her things (including her grandmother's piano), and Steele offers her the story of Markos Androkos, a Greek man he once worked for, who watched the ship that he'd worked so long and hard to buy explode as it was coming in to port, after which Markos actually laughs and says something like, "From now on, everything is new again. I get to start fresh!"

No more hard decisions to be made about what to keep and what to delete. No more worries about my DVR having taken hostages, keeping me tied to it out of fear of losing all my lovely shows.

Today, I am free to try something new and different!

. . . And, of course, I'm adding lots of DVD sets that I never thought I'd need to my Christmas 'wish-list' for my siblings and parents to peruse.

One must be practical, after all.