Isn't it just the way? My tivo went crazy and is now stuck in a reboot-green screen-reboot cycle. Called tech support, and was told to let it grind for three hours and call back. I wish there was some kind of password I could give tech support lines when I called to let them know I wasn't an idiot. That green screen is generated by the filesystem checker. If the screen stayed green, the FS checker would be running, and there's be a chance that it would fix the problem. But it's cycling. This means that the FS checker is dying without fixing the problem. After three hours, it's not going to be any better, and I'm not going to be any closer to a solution.

And I know the next bit too. Send the DVR to us, we'll fix it, charge you shipping, and send it back. This will take a couple of weeks. Now, there is a chance (provided the drive isn't, after nine months, borked. This is possible I suppose, since recording video all the time certainly does spin the drive a lot. But it's only nine months old at the outside) that I could fix the problem myself by popping the drive out and running some diagnostic tools on it. But, of course, you're not supposed to go opening up consumer electronics, and I do not want warranty trouble. SO I'll send it to them, and they will slap in a new hard drive. This means I will lose all the stuff on that drive, including my favortie Macgyver episode and a TV movie I'd been hoping they would show ever since I got the thing, and which they just did last night and I never got the chance to watch it. And, of course, they won't just send me the replacement drive, even though it would take me approximately eighteen seconds to install it by myself.

And this is the week the network season starts up. So I am going to miss out on the tivoey goodness of tivoing all my favorite shows which have just started up.

On top of all this, I've got one of those damn 20 hour skull-cracking headaches from sleeping on my neck wrong. And my NecroTech just got killed again.

I know that none of the problems in my life are really all that big (I mean, except for the big ones), but it's like when I was cleaning up my basement last week: the piles of boxes and ancient computers took a day or so to clean up. The small pieces of life-flotsam took the balance of the time. A billion styrofoam packing peanuts are as much work to clean up as a dozen boxes of old clothes. It takes as much time and effort to deal with a whole bunch of little things as it does do deal with a couple of big things. Like Sam Spade said, "Maybe some of them don't matter, but look at the number of them." The camel's back is loaded with straws, and each new one makes it shudder.

The most worrisome part of it is that there is a (small) glimmer of hope, which I will discuss at length when the mood strikes me to be able to do it justice. Each bad thing that happens (What I've talked about here is the tip of the iceberg) makes that glimmer more dear to me, which is cute and all, but when you start investing so much importance on a hope (especially one whose exact probability of turning out well), you can set yourself up for a fall.

If this doesn't work out, I really think I'm going to lose it.

And I watch too much damned TV anyway.