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Bored with the same old routine, my girlfriend and I recently decided to spice things up a bit and purchase some “equipment.” But just like the last time this happened, she’s having all the fun.
I, for one, am not a fan of the Personal Video Recorder (PVR), and  here’s why: I watch more TV. Way more. You’d think skipping commercials and saving over 15 minutes for each hour-long program would mean less television watching, but just like at a Chinese buffet, I can’t control myself. After stuffing my eyeballs with such delicacies as The Hills, My Super Sweet 16 and Gossip Girl, I’m left sweaty, bloated and way too proud of myself.
That’s because PVRs keep track of recording space, so the less recorded TV you watch, the more it climbs. 50%…65%…82%. The pressure’s relentless. Now when I’m done watching television, I somehow feel like I’ve accomplished something.
Which is exactly the opposite of how I feel when using a remote control now. Channel surfing has always been a skill of man, passed down from generation to generation, but PVRs have now made that talent extinct.
 No more flipping through channels at lightning speed, no more effortlessly watching three programs at once, no more expertly timed commercial breaks. I’m like a painter without a canvas. I ask you, how am I supposed to impress chicks now?
Certainly not with my TV knowledge. Without commercials, I have no way of finding out about the new batch of crappy programs I’ll inevitably record. A new game show with Regis? A show where dudes with moustaches are doing it with the wives of other dudes with moustaches? Benjamin Bratt’s exciting return to network TV? I need to be the first to know about these things!
But I don’t even know what’s happening on the shows I watch. With a PVR, there’s no such thing as appointment television. Just disappointment television, like when some moron from work tells you what happened on the season finale of Lost before you actually watch the season finale of Lost.
SPOILER ALERT: I KILLED HIM WITH MY LUNCH FORK.
The PVR also complicates my life at home. In the past, I never had to watch those obligatory “You made me watch sports all day” make-up shows that all women punish men with. My girlfriend or I would just move to the bedroom television.
Now, since all of our shows are stored on the PVR, our apartment’s been transformed from a two TV household into a one TV battleground. This requires much more diplomacy on both of our parts. I calmly ask, “How many fucking Law & Order’s can one person record?” And she sweetly replies, “Look who’s talking. You have a week’s worth of Letterman on there, asshole.”
 It’s just like in the movie Click, where Adam Sandler’s constant fast-forwarding eventually causes him to lose his wife. Click is the perfect metaphor, not because watching all this television is clearly a miserable way to spend my life, but because I only watched the piece of shit after recording it on my PVR.
So, will my girlfriend and I give up our newest addition to the family? In one word, “No.” We can’t. Sure, watching all that TV is a lot of work. Sure, it may be ruining our relationship and, yes, we may not see our friends anymore, but for all of its faults, we still love our PVR. After all, it’s ours. Everything inside it comes from us and all of its problems are direct results of our poor decisions.
And yes, I realize I’ve now compared PVRs to children and dildos. What can I say? I have TV to watch.
© 2008 Steve Dominey; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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