More than 25 years ago I mastered the fine art of programming a VCR. It changed my life forever. I did it mainly so that I could tape Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live ! late at night while I slept.
Since then I’ve been a self-admitted VCR junkie. Nowadays I’ve got 3 of them. They even have names – Arthur, Barney, and Charley – as in ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.
Arthur, Barney, and Charley are usually hard at work keeping busy every night, although they each get nights off occasionally. TONIGHT Arthur and Charley are working the night shift while Barney has the night off.
I even have an elabourate EXCEL spreadsheet that I utilize to track what recorded shows are on each of my active videocassettes (over 70 of them).
TiVo changed Kelly‘s life. It also changed a lot of lives of people that I know. Me and one of my former co-worker friends used to laugh hysterically early in the morning at some of her too-funny TiVo experiences. She would intentionally set her TiVo to tape a History Channel special on the Persian Gulf War, and then over the next few weeks she would end up getting shows like “Gomer Pyle, USMC”, “Hogan’s Heroes”, and “McHale’s Navy”. She would set her TiVo to record a Travel Channel show on the best cruises to take around the world, and she would eventually end up with a dozen “Love Boat” reruns. Her TiVo also decided that she was a HUGE Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers fan, so she ended up with an entire season of “Step By Step” on her TiVo ! Basically TiVo was deciding for her what she was going to watch rather than her deciding for herself.
I am proud to report that I am the ‘decider’. I am in sole control of what gets recorded by each of my VCRs, and Arthur, Barney, and Charley hardly ever let me down (although Arthur is starting to show signs of old age). He occasionally wheezes. He can be replaced. Allison is waiting in the wings.
CountUp 
One reply on “TiVo Changed Kelly’s Life”
I think you should go into stand up comedy. You are hilarious!
I also used to be a slave to my VCR. I had enough on the night that Dawson’s Creek was having it’s series finale. It was a Wednesday night and I was late to church and frantically trying to get my VCR to record. Something happened to my VCR – it got unhooked for video games. I was on the phone with my brother practically in tears, tangled up in wires and dust behind the tv because I couldn’t get it to hook up.
I have a great benefit to my tivo – “she” is not hooked up to a phone line. So I guess you could say she is a little dumb. Like you, I also have the only say in what is recorded. She tells me every day how long it has been since I hooked her into my phone line – 826 days so far. Poor girl. She is dying to tell me what she wants me to watch – too bad for her.