The Tivo’s have safely landed. That is to say, the Tivo adventure my husband and I embarked on over a week ago has come to a happy ending. After two different trips to our friends house so Tivo could make all the right phone calls and the span of over a week’s time, the Tivo’s are in their locations and working effectively. We got two of them and they actually talk to one another. It’s great now that they are all hooked up but the process of getting here was pretty grim. The friend’s house that we took the Tivo’s to told us stories of their co-workers that had not gotten as far as we had and just returned the Tivo’s thinking they were broken.

They were broken. We worked our way through that and now they are happily connected to the Internet (not a land line!).

So, to sum it up.

We bought two tivo’s to replace our cable DVR’s (which sucked and we paid rent to have them every month)
They have USB so should have no problem connecting to the home network-
OH WAIT, gotta make a land line call before anything else works, don’t have a land line? just go over to a friend’s house
oh, ok. so now you want me to impose on my friends because your product lacks some significant features—ok……
so we go to friend’s house not once, but twice–apparently it has to make 2 phones calls from the land line, the second of which is about 1 1/2 hours long.
after the second visit to said friend’s we leave the second Tivo there to complete it’s second call
product add-on, we need special equipment to get the Tivo’s onto the home network, first we buy generic and those don’t work, we are stuck with them as returning them would cost us a ‘re-shelving fee’ so it’s not worth it—-SO we had to purchase the Tivo branded products to get the Tivo’s on the home network

The Tivo’s made their calls. They are on the home networks. Tivo’s go.
But man, that was a lot of work. They should really fix this problem. Soon.

I know this is one of those things my friend Mahtab call’s ‘problems of the upper middle class‘. I really have no right to complain about anything. My life is good. But I feel I need to let my product experience with Tivo be known. This is the participation age after all. 😉