Confessions of a DVR Hoarder

A guy named @ilapogu on twitter made a joke about hoarding shows on your DVR, when it hit me:

For some of us, this is no joke.

I’m ace.  I’m a DVR Hoarder.

For six months I had Midnight Run kept on my DVR, on the Do Not Erase Until I Choose setting.  Because, Jack Walsh.  I mean, John Wesley Walsh.  Better cancel those credit cards, huh?

You just never know when you’re going to want to see that.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?  I love the part where Robert Downey Jr. shoots the guy accidentally, playing Russian roulette, and then says he didn’t expect the gun to go off because “there was only an 8% chance” of the bullet being in the chamber.

I keep that on the DVR.  For gun safety purposes. 

Even a terrible movie like The Dilemma — Vince Vaughn has that amazing “I’m gonna burn that little face!!” scene.  And where he screams to the neighborhood:  “I’m a problem.”  It might could be that someone might visit me some time, and say to me, “Hey, were there any funny parts in The Dilemma?,” and if I don’t have that ready to be replayed for him, I’ll never be able to answer his question.

I’ve got all six or seven episodes of this season’s Justified on there.  I love the shotgun sequence in “Kin,” I think.  And I’ve got most of this season’s Always Sunny, and all of this season’s Archer.

Hell, I tell you what, I bet there’s even a Columbo on there somewhere.

At one point I had, get this, 26 episodes of The Big Bang Theory.  You know, when you tell your DVR there’s no limit on the number of episodes it can record, it really goes crazybananas.

Turns out “No Limit” actually means “No Limit.”  It doesn’t step in to intervene, and exercise its own discretion, and say, “Well, you said no limit, but 12’s enough for anyone.”

Sometimes I just put things on there that I’m supposed to like, but I actually don’t. Like, at some point, I’m sure those Downton Abbeys will watch themselves, then neatly clear themselves from memory.

I’ve got like four Novas on Gothic Architecture and Lemurs.

Four. Two and two.  You wouldn’t think they could do two shows on each of them, but they did.

And I recorded them.

Why? I don’t know. At some point over the course of the past year I must have said, “I really need to know more about Gothic Architecture and Lemurs,” and then, like so many other abandoned projects, I just sort of forgot about it. 

It stopped seeming as important to me as it once had.

But it’s still kind of important.

So there those entries sit, haunting me, mocking me, thirty-two spaces down from the top, just above the The Celebrity Apprentice episode where Gary Busey gets fired.

Classic television.  In 20 years that’ll be worth something to a collector.  Working DVR with the Gary Busey Gets Fired episode in new mint condition?  You can’t put a price on that.  You can’t buy a memory.

Because you never know, do you? That’s the hell of it. You never know when you’ll need to rewatch these things, or watch these things you have no intention of actually watching.

And there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in having a DVR that’s filled up to the 98%– CRITICAL–YOU MUST DELETE SOME PROGRAMS IMMEDIATELY level. Kind of like that feeling you get opening a Craftsman toolbox stuffed to the brim with tools.  That you’re prepared for any contingency.

Or it’s like putting on all the TV’s and lights in a hotel room the moment you get there and keeping them on all night long when you’re out.  As a friend pointed out to me, “If you’re not sucking out every bit of free juice the hotel is providing you, you’re losing money — think about it.”

I did, and now I do that every time I travel.

Or maybe I’m just sad. Like Vince Vaughn said in The Dilemma, “I’m a problem.”

I think I’ll watch that scene again. It’s a good scene. Never gets old. He really commits to it. Here, let me prove it to you.

Clarification:  @liapogu clarifies he got this idea from an Aussie comic named Jim Jefferries.  So I still stole it, I just stole it from a different guy than the one I thought I was stealing it from.