Deliver Us from Evil

A few days before Christmas, a betrayal. From my last friend in the world: TECHNOLOGY.

I should have noticed it early Saturday evening (when I got home from Friday evening festivities). The DVR box didn't seem to have amassed any new programs. Not that there was any one thing that I was highly anticipating, but there are always flotsam and jetsam that I send the old box to retrieve for me, like the obedient dog I never had.

By Sunday, it was more obvious. My fucking Scientific Atlanta 8300 HDc (Hi-Def DVR, from Time Warner Cable in NYC) box wasn't obeying any of my god-damn recording orders! At under 30% capacity, it wasn't a question of harddrive space—and even if it were that, there should have been a warning. Most disconcerting of all was that there was NO warning. No indication of errors.

There has always been an unspoken Master-Slave relationship between Man and his Machines. And this machine had no excuse beyond flagrant disobedience.

I tried to troubleshoot on my own. It will record manually, but it won't record any program that I tell it to record in advance. Not even 4 minutes in advance. Pre-recorded programs seem fine. But there are NO error messages concerning why it won't record anything in advance.

I've had some minor issues with the box since I swapped it for my old, busted box a number of weeks ago. My old Scientific Atlanta HD box barely gave me a lick of trouble until it utterly died on me. This slightly newer HDc box doesn't seem to have any aspects that are improvements in functionality. Everything just seems to work slower, more cumbersome, and just worse. And refusing to record programs, with no discernible reason, is just the final affront. THAT'S WHAT I'M PAYING IT TO DO!

It uses different software than my old box. That seems to be the core of the problem. And accounts I've read via GOOGLE don't motivate me to call the atrocious Time Warner customer service, or take the time to swap this box out for yet another one. The online verdict seems to be that these efforts are futile. This mourning, before heading off to work, I did a little reboot of the damned abomination. I'll see if that bitchslaps some sense into it when I get home...
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Nothing like working on Christmas Eve. I don't think I ever did it when I worked here before. Even if I wasn't going anywhere or doing anything, Christmas was my little break.

But alas, I need the money. And we're being offered the merciful bounty of getting to leave 3 hours early today. I assume it should be pretty dead today, which means I should still have plenty of time for reading—even a little writing, if I get that ambitious.

Finished reading THE FOUNTAINHEAD last night and I'm onto ATLAS SHRUGGED—I hope that's the one that includes Big Daddies harvesting Little Sisters, and people shooting bees out of their hands...