AARRRGGGHHH! Hulk ANGRY!

I don't think of myself as a particularly demanding guy. Generally speaking, I'm patient and I'm usually willing to put up with a lot. But I absolutely hate it when the geniuses who run TV channels don't put the flippin' shows on when they say they will.

Let me say right now that I think the PVR (that's Personal Video Recorder for those of you who came late) is one of the great inventions of the past few years. I use mine to record all my favorite programs whenever they come on. Because my schedule can be unpredictable, I count on my PVR, and the digital program guide it runs from, to be accurate so that when I get home all my programs will be there, ready for me to watch at my leisure. The best part of the PVR/program guide integration is that if, for some crazy reason, a show winds up being pre-empted or shown on another night, the PVR will catch the change, as long as the program guide is updated in time.

This evening I was positively giddy about being home to watch the second-season premiere of "Sleeper Cell" on The Movie Network. "Starts December 10 at 10 pm", I read. Being just a little, er, retentive, I checked my digital cable program guide: there it was, 10 pm. Sooooo, at a couple of minutes before 10 I curled up in my comfy leather recliner and switched over to channel 537, all ready to see what kind of trouble Oded Fehr and Michael Ealy and the boys can get into this year...

and what did I discover? To use the vernacular of the TV biz, I joined regular programming already in progress! The #&^%$ show started at 9! Impardonable sin number 1: running a program a full hour early.

Followed closely by impardonable sin number 2. The program ran until (approximately) 10:30. So even if the geniuses had started running the program at the originally scheduled time, the PVR would have dutifully stopped recording after one hour, leaving the last half-hour unrecorded.

I was able to channel my rage into a pithy e-mail to the people at The Movie Network. The answer (if any) that I receive will determine the depth of my indignation over the coming days. It's likely to take me a couple of weeks, though, to have any trust in the program guide.

I mean, geez Louise, it's television, people! Come on! It's not like you're running the space program or anything. Just do what you say you're going to do and I'll be able to put down this baseball bat I'm brandishing wildly right now...