"Oh, don't be silly," I said to one of our friends. "Just because we're getting one of these doesn't mean that we're going to watch a lot more television than we do right now."

He laughed. "Yeah, right."

One day after it arrived: "Hey, Jeff! Look at this! If I just punch in 'A,' it'll format a listing of all the movies available over the next two weeks, in alphabetical order. Isn't this cool?"Jeff giggled and nodded as we scrolled through the list. The primary goal of looking through all the movies was to find ones that we wanted to record and watch (The Red Violin and Sneakers being our first choices). In about three minutes, though, this quickly devolved into 'Guess Which Movies are Lifetime Movies.'

Oh, come on, admit it. You know the ones I'm talking about: "A Child Lost Forever." "Whose Daughter Is She?" "Empty Cradle." There's a subtle naming scheme for Lifetime movies that I've never quite been able to nail down, but if you see enough of the movie titles, you know the naming scheme exists.

In our pre-TiVo days, we would scroll through the endless tedium of the TV Guide Channel to find out what was playing. One of the highlights was always bellowing out the name of tonight's Lifetime movie to whichever spouse wasn't in the room at the time.

The absent spouse would come into the living room. We'd look at each other and cackle. "People actually watch this stuff?"

From lifetimetv.com: "In fact, Lifetime is women's #1 choice for movies. And this viewer loyalty has translated into some of the highest ratings on basic cable." Bwah? we said. Who are these women? What are they smoking? What kind of degenerative disease has attacked their brain tissue, and is there anything we can do to guide them back into the light? Why does this stuff get great ratings while beauties like Futurama and MST3K get canceled?

Well, apparently someone watches the stuff. Not in our house, though. We'd take it off the "channels received" list on our new TiVo, except that it's too much fun to read the movie names. It more than makes up for accidentally seeing the channel in our list of channels.

So, as the days roll on, we each spend some time each day informing the TiVo of what shows we like and don't like. The TiVo uses our preferences to pick random extra shows to record. The first couple of days' worth were pretty ludicrous; the shows were instantly given thumbs-down and deleted. After that, I spent some more time giving shows thumbs-down and thumbs-up, in the hopes of getting better results.

I realize it's silly to feel sorry for a machine, but in a way I do. You have to hope that it's figured out that there's more than one person watching the shows that are recorded. It would really help if I could tell it that Person A (who strongly resembles my spouse) adores shows like Battlebots, Enterprise, and Junkyard Wars, but isn't quite so enthusiastic about the cooking shows and the older movies. Person B (who strongly resembles a certain domesticat) watches Farscape passionately, Junkyard Wars if it's on, but will also watch things like Chef!, ER, and various other nongeeky shows if she remembers.

Oh, yeah, and the movies: geeky movies are for both of us, the classics and high cinema ones are mainly for me.

Like I said. Poor TiVo.

So, anyway, back to the story. So I sit down yesterday with a very late lunch, and decide to see what's been randomly-recorded for us. I hit the play button and there it is, a nugget from my childhood: Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

"Damn you, TiVo. That's mean." My finger hovered over the button that would delete the show. The question: do I remain stalwart, scoff at the silliness of the show, and go on to watch something less fluffy?

Heck no. I loved the show when I was a kid. Mom watched it, and therefore I saw a lot of it as well. (We didn't watch a lot of television then, so this is a bit more unusual than some of you may realize.) I watched it while eating my lunch, and afterwards classified it as one of the guiltiest pleasures I've had in quite some time. Afterwards, in a show of minor rebellion, I told the TiVo to keep recording the show, and gave it a … thoroughly embarrassed … thumbs-up.

Then I thought in horror: oh, God, please don't let this one be airing on Lifetime, because if it is, I am never going to hear the end of this from Jeff.

What a relief it was to realize that it was being rebroadcast on PAX. Excellent. My reputation, although sullied, would remain intact.

(A note: I checked again this morning: today, the TiVo picked MacGyver. For Jeff, undoubtedly; here's hoping that it'll be just as much of a guilty pleasure for him as yesterday's show was for me.)