Mexico Medical Student |

I wasn’t a TiVo early adopter, but I definitely was the first in my circle to get it. TiVo is one of those handful of products one comes across that forever changes the way you use or look at something. I can never fathom living a life of mindless channel surfing without knowing what it is I’m seeing ever again. Before moving to Mexico, I knew there was no TiVo service proper, but I had read a few pages here and there about fixing it to be useful, perhaps downlading the relevant .xml files from some free source given that there aren’t that many cable/sat providers in Mexico.

I was wrong.

There is no TV feed to download from anywhere. My TiVo is simply a 30-minute digital video buffer with which I can pause/move live TV a little. Down but not out, I decide to shell out the few pesos extra to get a digital box and basic digital service so at least I can use a guide to see what’s coming on. Big useless mistake. Not only does the guide have the wrong data so many times, but the programming is all in Spanish, even for the movies that are in English! So while it’s a pain in the ass to constantly translate a movie like Arma Mortal II (”Lethal Weapon II”), it’s at least doable. What is impossible to do is backtranslate movies for which the title has been changed completely, such as ¿Quien puede matar un niño? for “Island of the Damned.” (literal transaltion: “Who could kill a child?”) Pouring lime juice and salt on this gaping wound, we don’t have the same HBO the rest of the world apparently does. Apparently this weekend starts Rome which I was looking forward to seeing. Is it showing here? Nope. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen even a repeat of “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” or many other HBO goodies. Looking at the “HBO Latino” home page, it shows programming we don’t have. We aren’t even good enough for the “Latino” version of US HBO/MAX. We get some kind of leftover scraps like “Jumanji” and “The Mask” that the US wouldn’t even want at 3:00AM. I’m sorry, that last title should be La Máscara.

Most importantly, I have been robbed of quality study breaks. I am not an idle TV watcher, not only because it’s usually boring, but because I have a tendency to get sucked in via inertia if I sit there and do nothing. I like waiting until I can see something in peace in my own time. Not having any idea what’s coming next (except excruciatingly looking through each channel, one by one, in the future) is enfuriating. I didn’t upgrade my TiVo to 120+ hours to have it sit there and be a digital paperweight!

How I ironic that when I first got here I was excited because I saw two full-length classical programs in the same weekend! I guess I met my quota for the year.