Recording TV Shows On My DVR

May 26th, 2020

I’ve recently been listening to the “slow” and “reverbed” music selection on YouTube. I don’t know what about this genre that is really enticing, but I take it as a metaphor that sometimes slowing things down a notch helps us pay attention to the individual notes and rhythms. Or maybe there’s something about the slower tempo that gives certain songs a completely different vibe. I stand by my first explanation. That definitely sounds cooler and more impactful. But anyways, I’m digressing from my topic, I don’t want to be too click-baity.

I can’t believe that my sister and I used to huddle in our living room television with a bag of mini popcorn and CapriSun while we watched pre-recorded TV shows on our Dish DVR (god these guys overcharged the hell out of our TV plan). There’s something surreal about clutching the remote and watching Regular Show with your sibling when your mom’s scheduled recordings suddenly hijacks your current cinematic experience, causing you all sorts of anguish in the fact that you couldn’t watch Rigby slap the hell out of Mordecai for being a complete idiot. For those of you who have never really had this experience let me explain:

We had two Dish DVRs in our house. One was in my parent’s bedroom and the other one was in the living room. My mom used to watch a bunch of Indian TV shows and these would usually only stream at night, which was prime time for when my sister and I would watch our favorite Cartoon Network TV shows. However, Dish didn’t have the ability to record shows in the background. Instead, they would basically switch over to the show that you wanted to record and then record it that way. If you wanted to switch to a different channel, you’d have to cancel the recording. It was a stupid process, but I assume that the engineers at Dish didn’t really think this through or they just made the solution to this infuriating process a new feature in their upgraded plans. Seriously, I hate these guys, they’re just evil.

Now, life would be fine and dandy, if it wasn’t for the fact that my mom recorded not one, but TWO TV shows at the same time. Alas, they would hog both the DVRs at 7pm. So what did we do? We just cancelled one of my mom’s recording schedules and watched our shows in the living room lol. In hindsight, we were being terrible kids and we could’ve discussed some kind of compromise. But I don’t think it really mattered since my mom never really brought this up (so she probably didn’t care). Thank god we moved on from this era of television.

It’s kinda crazy to see that most of our favorite TV shows have moved to some kind of online platform. I don’t even know many people who actually watch TV with a service provider. Our family moved to a Roku a few years back and it was honestly the best decision ever. No more dealing with these clunky DVRs and overpriced TV plans.