It starts with one little glitch

Published 1:30 am Friday, July 24, 2026

Recently something happened at home that made me swear. And I don’t swear very often and when I do it’s usually the s—- word.

A little back story. Mike and I have a group of TV shows we record and watch together: Jeopardy, Amazing Race, Survivor, Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, 9-1-1, NBC Nightly News, High Potential, NCIS, The Rookie, Grays Anatomy and lots of NFL and college football games. We record EVERYTHING so we don’t have to sit through commercials.

Mike stays up much later than I do and he has an occasional free day at home when he’s not volunteering at various places around town — so he has time to watch shows that I’m not interested in like Chicago PD, Shark Tank, NCIS Origins, Tom Hanks’ WWII, Deadliest Catch and lots of shows on Discovery or History.

On the other hand, I have a few shows that I enjoy watching that are not his favorite, like old episodes of Criminal Minds, early Law and Order SVU, and a couple of weird murder mystery series or strange time-line stories. He’s willing to watch them with me but since I know he doesn’t really enjoy them I wait until he has an evening meeting or is gone to Fort Lewis for his once-a-month Special Forces meeting.

So Tuesday night Mike was at a church council meeting and wouldn’t be home for dinner so I stopped at my favorite quick food place (Taqueria San Jose) and picked up three ground beef tacos and headed for home, looking forward to Season 3, Episode 6 of “Forensic Coroner.”

I changed into my jammies and sat down on the couch at 6:02 p.m. — plenty of time to watch at least two episodes.

I opened the box of tacos, grabbed the remote, and spoke “WATCHME” into the remote. A message telling me I was entering a third-party app appeared and I watched the little circle spinning for three minutes.

Then a message came up asking me for my username and password. I had to try three times ‘cause I kept messing up my password.

Finally success. Then the spinning circle again for another couple of minutes before the screen showed me a selection of shows available. Again I say “Forensic Coroner.” Several minutes later the screen showed me eight seasons were available so I clicked on season 3 then scrolled down to episode 6. By now my tacos were cold and I was getting frustrated.

But I wasn’t about to give up.

Finally the opening scene of “Forensic” appeared and I clicked on “skip intro.” The little bar across the bottom of the screen indicated the show was fast forwarding — until everything froze for at a few more minutes and my blood pressure started to climb.

But never fear, things start moving again and the opening scenes of episode 8 began. Everything moved smoothly until the phone rang and I hit pause to answer what turned out to be a spam call.

And wouldn’t you know it, when I tried to push play to get going again, I hit “exit” by mistake and everything went blank.

That’s when I swore. And it a little stronger than my usual outburst.

I thought about giving up and reading but then I tried again ‘cause I really wanted to know which really bad person the leading actor was going to eliminate this time.

So I started over. Every step. Taking my time so I didn’t accidentally hit the wrong button, and this time it worked almost flawlessly. I only had to enter my username and password one time.

But then halfway through the episode it hit me that I had consumed two glasses of iced tea with my taco dinner and I really had to go. “Too bad,” I thought. “You can wait ‘til the end of the show.” I wasn’t going to risk hitting “pause” and having to start over again. So I waited until the credits rolled, then ran (well, really I just walked quickly) to the bathroom and when I got back to the family room, Mike was already home from his meeting.

So we watched the nightly news.

But least I got to eat some really yummy tacos, watch one episode of “Forensic Coroner” and only swore one time.

All in all, a pretty good evening and lots of episodes left to watch.