Thursday, 10/20/05

My Tivo is very slightly broken. The same day the moderately controversial OS 7.2 version got downloaded and installed, the thing began hopping forward half a second or so every time it was unpaused, and after every thirty-second leap forward. I figured this was a glitch to be corrected, and after a couple of weeks of awkward baseball replays I went looking for an email address through which to register my incremental annoyance.

However, Tivo is no longer providing email support, so I had to wait until some quiet afternoon when I had half an hour to kill to call them up and register my annoyance in a rather more time-consuming fashion. Bonnie, a charming phone rep if ever there was one, took my concerns so seriously that she almost immediately offered to replace the whole unit, despite its being more than a year out of warranty.

I had to jump through a few hoops first by making sure that the VCR pass-through wasn't implicated, and less helpful support reps would later insist that my remote might be broken, but after dissuading them of this fanciful notion I eventually did get an RMA number, and sent my revolutionary televisual buddy off to Louisville to be poked and prodded by well-meaning experts. When I unwisely inquired about why this wasn't costing me anything, I was told that the RMA process had been unsettled by the unexpected closure of a receiving facility and warehouse, and that contrary to stated policy Tivo isn't charging anybody for returns or exchanges at the moment. Who am I to argue with logic like that? Even the weak 30-day warranty on the refurb replacement isn't worth fighting over; the hard drive in the box I had has been running 24/7 since 2002 and was not going to live forever.

However, the downside of largesse-via-logistical-upheaval is that they received my unit (my dependence is such that I will tolerate a Freudian interpretation) last Monday morning and as of this afternoon still haven't shipped the replacement. I was told a very strange story about how they will only be able to track it by the USPS delivery confirmation number under which I sent the box to them, and I can't eliminate the possibility that the rep with whom I spoke today was just nervously making things up.

It seems unlikely that I'll have it back by the start of the World Series, a prospect I greet as warmly as watching a baseball game through one of those Clockwork Orange contraptions. I watched an episode of Lost last night with nothing but a mute button to protect me from the commercials; it was a terrible experience. My old friend Sarah wrote an unconventional CSI episode that airs tonight, and I may have to go the BitTorrent route if I can't find the groove. Truly, man was not supposed to live like this. 05:55PM «

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