It always surprises me how little things can throw me off balance sometimes. Tonight, it was a technology malfunction.

While my television watching has plummeted over the past three months, other family members have been missing their DVR, so we replaced our defunct unit (which broke back in Georgia) this week. I finally picked up the HDMI cable and the CableCard, and set everything up.

And of course, it didn’t work. We couldn’t get the card and the cable paired up.

Rather than simply shrugging off this moment of technical difficulty, which will resolve, no doubt, with tomorrow’s service call, my first instinct is to assume that this problem will never be resolved–that I wasted money, and time, on an overpriced toy that doesn’t even work.

Infantile, I know.

So tonight, I tried to suspend such thoughts. I walked through the troubleshoot call, set up the service call, and that’s that.

It’s doubly ironic, I think, that I would let the failure of this device upset me, given how little I watch TV. But of course it’s not the failure of the device that upsets me. It’s that unsettling reminder that there are many, many things in this world that are beyond my control–and CableCard syncing is indeed one of them.

So it’s off to bed with my book now–a trusty piece of technology indeed!