Growing up, I had a black and white TV in my bedroom. The screen couldn't have been more than 11 inches from bottom left to upper right, but how cool was I that 3 whole stations, fuzzy and bland as they were, somehow made it to the small box in my bedroom? In the living room, we had a 19 inch set that actually had color. On it, we could watch 5 stations. Three were out of Youngstown, one was out of Cleveland and the last was out of Alliance (PBS).
Sometime when I was 7 or 8, my grandparents had cable turned on at their house. Not only did they have a huge console TV, which was all of about 25 inches diagonally in the glossy wooden cabinet, but we could get upwards of 30 whole channels! Watching TV was a true experience at their house.
Not one to be beaten, the male part of my gene pool called Armstrong and not only signed us up for cable and HBO, but went out and bought a big screen TV for the basement. Life suddenly centered around television - when no one was really watching it, the Weather Channel or CNN replayed constantly. But when someone wanted to see something, we placed bids on the TV in the basement and spent hours waiting for our programs to begin.
Soon, we had a VCR and we had to figure out how to set the time if we wanted to record our shows. The blinking light was no match for a young teen that wanted to see Poltergeist one more time!
In college, I headed to Miami sans TV. I really thought one of my roommates would be bringing a boob-tube but no dice. Not one of the 5 of us had the money nor the parents back home that would afford us outside entertainment. It was the first time in my life I couldn't just flick on the TV when I was bored and at first, I hated it. We all did.
We went through withdrawals and eventually a group of us formed that would go to the movies twice a week just so we could have some mindless entertainment. Schlepping 10 of us across town on the monorail was a feat in and of itself, but once we met up with the group of guys that would inevitably want to come, it was a true miracle anyone got to see the screen.
After a few months, we really didn't need the movies anymore to entertain our ever-overloaded brains and mindless entertainment became passe. The trips across town became an excuse to just hang out and even after moving back home, it was a long time before TV actually interested me again.
Then, on a stormy day in the middle of summer, that all changed.
A few years after Miami, I was hanging out with a friend, one of my former professors from Sussex, who had satellite TV. It was a totally new concept to me and as I sat in her living room in Newton, New Jersey, watching her scroll down hundreds of channels, I was in awe. No VCR was needed to record programs, no more remembering when to turn on a machine to record or having to set the clock every time the power went out so my weekly programs would record. She had something called a "DVR". Light from heaven shined down and angels sang. I made her walk me outside to look at her setup in the raging weather and I memorized everything she told me.
I got in the car and drove as fast as I could to tell my husband and before the end of the day, I had called and put in our order. It was back in the early days when the system was still being developed, back when people still used the term "Tivoed" to mean they recorded something digitally. But we loved it. We'd flop down on the couch and scan all 450 channels (we skipped the 100 that had sports on them) and we'd hit the record button a hundred times in 10 minutes with all the programming we didn't want to miss. It was glorious.
We told everyone about it. You can record without having to program anything! No, there is no blinking clock that needs to be set! Yes - you can watch one channel while recording on another! Oh My! Life was grand. If DirecTv had that offer back then where they give you $100 for each referral, we'd have made some cool cash. We had everyone turned on to it!
But then we realized as our prices rose, it was time to reconsider our options. The cable company was now up-to-speed and we really didn't want Sprint running our internet connection any longer, so after 9 years of DirecTv, we sent back our boxes and went with the cable company. They were good but they weren't as good as satellite. Still, we made do.
Then we moved to Ohio. Armstrong kicked some ass when it came to our DVR. It was on par with the DirecTv system, minus some functions we had come to love. But still, at any given time, you could turn our TV system on and find it 50% full of programs just waiting to be watched. We never missed anything! Mornings at the water cooler talking about last night's shows put us at the top of the TV gossip pile. We had "access" to everything and we loved it!
So when we decided to pull up and move again, it was a big consideration as to whether we were going to go back to satellite, as most RVers do, or if we were going to stick with the cable in the park. It's not bad, the resort cable, now that we have it working well. After all, we get about 40 channels, which include 4 HBO stations. And most of our favorites are on there, Fox News, Food Network, FX, Travel, HGTV, Comedy Central, USA, Discovery and TNT. We're missing Pay-per-View, Syfy and the Military Channel, but we're okay so far without them. (Thank goodness for Redbox!)
However, the one thing we don't have - a DVR.
Life has come to a stand still. Now, it's back to the old days, watching the clock to get to the TV for our favorite shows. Putting them on a calendar to remind us when they are on. Researching their existence on the web to see if we can stream them online.
I've been lucky, GLEE and Swamp People are easily accessible, as are most ABC, NBC and CBS shows. However, not all shows are so open about their broadcasting and easily watched. Kitchen Nightmares, for example, or Dancing With the Stars. Sure, we can see recaps, but no full episodes.
It was a mess last week when the finales of American Idol and Dancing with The Stars was on at the same time. It was an earth-shattering decision to watch one over the other, but the stations made us choose by purposefully scheduling them at the same time!
It's going to happen again when Hell's Kitchen and America's Got Talent are on the same nights starting July 19th. Neither is available online. What are they thinking? Don't they know not everyone in America is digitally savvy? Please don't make us choose! There's too much pressure, I swear!
So it's come down to looking for a way to record as much as we can. We've been back and forth on setting up a computer station at the television. It's one way to go but probably not the most cost-effective and definitely not easily programmable.
We've talked about dipping back into satellite TV, but seeing where people have to put their dishes here, and knowing how expensive it is, it's also not one of our first choices.
Tonight we went back and looked again at TIVO receivers. However, the additional $20 a month for service and the fact that it probably won't work with the cable (that's indirectly DirecTv broadcasting through the clubhouse) that we have here in the park causes us to second-guess ourselves on this plan.
So what's left?
Yep, you guessed it. If we can find one, if there's one out there and usable, we're going to look for a VCR (right after we've sold and given away all 200 of our VHS movies). They're extremely hard to come by, and because of their scarcity, their prices have gone back up. However, we just don't see any other way to handle this dilemma.
Ugh.
Really, I'm okay with the huge tapes and having to remember to rewind them before we re-record the next night's programming. It's doable, the weekly scheduling I'm going to have to remember to do. I'm even okay with the fact that we'll be able to only record one show at a time. However, the one thing that ticks me off the most - someone's going to have to remind me again how to set the clock to get rid of that damn flashing light!
No comments:
Post a Comment