Verizon FiOS has ruined my marriage

I love technology. If you take away porn, gadget sites are the number one place I visit on the internet (If you include porn, they’re 837th, but that’s still pretty high on the list when you consider just how many quality porn sites there are). I love technology so much that I was recently “arrested” for “trying to trade my infant daughter” for an “iPad2″ — which was totally bogus because I was only trying to steal it and the iPad turned out to be an empty Xoom box anyway.

This is information you need to know so that you don’t think what I’m about to say comes from a Unabomber place of irrational technology hate. I’m not my father, fiddling with remote controls angrily wondering why there needs to be so many buttons; I’m a guy who knows his way around a Gizmodo.

Anyway, here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure that the Verizon FiOS multi-room DVR ruined my marriage.

See, the Verizon FiOS multi-room DVR has two tuners — which means that you can watch two taped shows simultaneously in any room equipped to do so. So, if you don’t like something that’s being watched in the main room, you can go to another room and watch whatever you want. And I don’t mean that you have to watch what’s being shown on live TV like a peasant. You can go to another room and watch whatever recorded show you want, skipping past the commercials like Jeebus intended.

In theory this is a good thing: technology giving you the gift of choice.

In practice, though, it’s awful. The DVR has become a brutal metaphor for just how divided a marriage with FiOS can be.

When you scroll down, there are no longer “shows” being recorded — there are “her shows” and there are “my shows” and that is it. You might wonder about the middle of the Venn Diagram — the place where “our shows” are recorded — but that place doesn’t exist. There is no “our” when there is an unlimited amount of “your.”

This is because once you have the knowledge that there is a library of shows that you like (for me, mostly episodes of PTI, classic movies my wife will never watch, and that one episode of Sportscenter when Hannah Storm was dressed like a cowgirl), any deviation from that list constitutes a compromise, even if you enjoy the show your compromising on. So, while I like Modern Family, I’ll never love it as much as I will an episode of PTI (so long as Five Good Minutes doesn’t involve a college basketball coach). And while my wife might tolerate watching Godfather II or Citizen Kane, she’ll never be able to forget the fact that there are like nine hundred episodes of Cougar Town or Desperate Housewives just a button push away.

By giving us exactly what we want whenever we want it, the DVR has destroyed our ability to enjoy things we might not necessarily want. Our lives are tailored to our own tastes, which makes every experience outside that small bubble a favor to someone else’s taste. And who wants to use up a favor on Cougar Town?

What happens, then, is that my wife and I fall into a pattern of watching TVs in separate rooms, occasionally seeing each other when we both need to go to the bathroom or when we realize that our son has escaped from his room and is trying to light one of the couches on fire. Then we kiss and she goes off to bed and I go off to write blog updates and penis jokes.

And it’s all Verizon’s fault.

I’m interested in other places where technology — especially entertainment technology — might be affecting our lives negatively. Please write a response. Also, please don’t write a response saying that my wife and I should just make more of an effort to watch each other’s shows. That’s great advice but it’s also like saying I’m going to wake up early, learn Mandarin, and then do Yoga while cleaning the kitchen. It’s the kind of thing you say you want to do, but you never actually accomplish because the alternative is so much easier.

Clacked by Jay Black
on Apr 15, 2011 @ 11:00 EST5EDT