The Tale Of The Treacherous TV Technology

She thought she'd done everything right.

She was going out of town, and she knew she had to take certain precautions. She'd turned off the water heater. She'd closed the windows. She'd strategically left a few lights on when she'd slipped out, as quietly as possible, in the dead of night. But even before she'd done any of those things, she'd taken a good half-hour to deal with her DVR.

After having used a DVR for the better part of a decade, she understood very well how they work. Most importantly, she knew their capacity wasn't infinite. And the day before she left, it had been more than 60% full; that wouldn't do. She'd gone through her list of recordings, considering each one as though testing its weight in her hand. Was it something she'd already seen, but that she was keeping on the DVR so she could play it in the background while she was working at her desk? Was it something recorded from one of the premium movie channels that would undoubtedly air again? Then there was her list of scheduled recordings. Would any of them be available after they aired on a famous video streaming site? If the answer to any of these questions was yes, the recording was deleted -- consigned to flames of woe, never to be seen again.

In this way, she'd winnowed the list down to just the essentials.

She thought she'd done everything right.

And so, she enjoyed her trip, thinking she could not possibly have any worries about her TV technology. After all, it was the technology she used more frequently than any other in her life. Some days, she didn't even drive her car or touch her iPad...or, if she was being completely honest, use her electric toothbrush. But if she was at home, her TVs would be on for part or nearly all of the day.

Before long, it was time for her to journey home -- and quite the journey it was. There was a drive from one town to another, several hours away, so that her husband could pick up the flash he'd left there three days earlier. From there, they drove on to another town, where they'd be boarding their first plane. Three hours in flight were followed by three hours on the ground in another airport and then another three-hour flight. She waited for her luggage. She took a shuttle to her car. She drove it home. She'd been travelling, by that point, for eighteen hours.

When she stepped inside her apartment, she went straight to the TV in her bedroom as though pulled there by forces beyond her physical control. Proximity to her DVR -- to her recordings -- was, in a sense, the very thing that made her feel at home. There were shows she would need to watch that night in order to write about them the next day, and eagerly, she turned on the TV and the DVR, before she'd even taken off her shoes, expecting them to respond exactly as they had every other day for so many years. Why shouldn't she expect that they would?

She thought she'd done everything right.

The TV clicked on, and after several seconds, the screen remained black. After a moment, a message appeared in the corner of the screen:

"Searching for satellite signal 771."

Hm. That was strange. She'd never seen anything like that before -- but then again, she'd only been a satellite customer for three or four months. She figured she'd deal with it later, and just watch a recording instead.

But…the list of recordings looked shorter than it should have been. Where was Parks & Recreation? Where were all her Mad About Yous? WHERE WAS BEVERLY HILLS, 90210?!

Horror gripped her throat with an icy hand as the enormity of what she was looking at finally dawned on her. For the first day she'd been gone, everything had been fine. Everything had recorded on schedule, as she had expected it would.

But on the second day, something had gone horribly wrong. On the second day, the satellite signal was knocked out, by chance or misadventure or the hand of a mischievous gremlin. And because she hadn't been here to see and to fix it, the problem had persisted. Starting on that second day, nothing she had scheduled had recorded, for five full days of what was then still a very young fall TV season.

It was as though a demon had erased five days of her life.

Suddenly, she heard a moan: "NOOOOOOOOOOO!" It was deep and low (it was, after all, almost 11 PM), and she almost looked around to see where it was coming from before she realized. It was coming from herself. She was making that noise. But it was coming from some part of herself that, until that day, she hadn't known existed.

Soon enough, her husband reached the satellite company, and with some help troubleshooting the problem, the signal was restored.

But not the recordings. Never the recordings. Those recordings -- which had seemed as real to her as the hairs on her head or fingers on her hands -- had never existed for her. They had been phantoms all along.

Over time, she put her life back together. She made a list of the shows she'd missed and found ways to watch them. She moved forward. She moved on. She even made plans to take another trip, and another after that. She allowed herself to trust that, while she was away from it, her DVR would perform as it should.

But part of her knew she couldn't count on that. Not really.

Because she'd thought it before.

She'd thought she'd done everything right.