"TiVo destroyed my marriage!"

You can picture the cover illustration on a retro pulp-fiction dime novel with that title, can't you?

TiVo has many charms, and the company frequently adds little service enhancements to fine-tune the interface. That's all well and good, but Mr. Tangerine was trying to figure out why last week's episode of Heroes (which you should all be watching) wasn't waiting for him in the Now Playing list. He navigated to the place that tells you what's happened to one of your scheduled shows, and got this little explanation:

"This program was deleted because someone in your household removed it from the Now Playing List on Mon 10/30 at 10:58 pm."

You like how TiVo sows the seeds of interpersonal conflict? Odds are, Mr. Tangerine himself inadvertently pressed the Delete button and zapped his show. But TiVo's all suspicious: "Someone in your household—I'm not naming names, but I think you can figure out who—is clearly out to get you." It just strikes me as a little pissy and passive-aggressive. But TiVo can get away with that sort of behavior, because nobody throws TiVo out of the house. TiVo's place is secure. TiVo needs to get knocked down a peg or two.

Update! In a tizzy because he needed to see last week's episode, Mr. Tangerine downloaded it from iTunes. While watching it, he realized that oh, yeah, he watched it last Monday...and then deleted it from TiVo after watching it. And still TiVo casts blame broadly and sows dissension!