Screw NBC...

ARGH!

NBC is driving me nuts right now.

I had planned to spend a quiet night in tonight.

Hey! Don't roll your eyes! Yes, it's a Saturday night and, yes, I could be doing something much less loser-ish. But I'm getting old - I have a trick knee and everything. I'm tired. I work 40 hours a week and I go to school full-time. And I blog; I'm obviously just not that cool anyway.

Anyhoo... back to my quiet night in sweats at casa de Nagel... I missed this week's "Office," which isn't a big surprise. I still have yet to see a new episode when it originally airs. So, I was planning to come home, log-on to NBC's site and watch streaming video of the episode. I'd be done in 25 minutes and ready to go on to something else (another beer? an on-demand movie? a pint of Ben & Jerry's? I'm a wild man - who knows what'll happen?).

Of course it couldn't have been that easy.

The streaming video wouldn't stream. I can handle that mostly, but this was choppier than sharing a water-bed with a pre-diet Subway Jared. To make matters worse, every time the episode cut to the little commercials NBC inserts, the show would start again from the beginning. And then, the option to skip a segment didn't work, either. Meaning that I was forced to watched the first segment half a dozen times.

In frustration, I tried to download the episode (NBC will give them to you free for 48 hours before erasing your viewing privileges). But you first have to have NBC's specially designed viewer. That doesn't work on Macs. Now, granted, Apple only owns an 8% market share... but, think about it, who are the ones watching shows online? Yup, that's right, the younger, hipper, smarter, better-looking, Mac-owning crowd.

Then, I tried downloading the player on my sister's PC. That took about 20 minutes, because Microsoft makes everything as complicated and as user-unfriendly as possible. And (of course!), I had to get the newest version of the crappy Windows Media Player in order to get the NBC Viewer thing to run. Ten more minutes of downloads there...

After all of that hullabaloo... did I get to watch The Office?

No.

Instead, I received a nice, fat error message.

F. U.
N. B. C.
F. U.

(A little background here... NBC has chosen to not make its shows available for download through iTunes. So, instead of being able to drop two bucks for an episode that I can watch in less than 10 minutes with a single click, I had to pull out handfuls of the little hair I have left - most of which is in my nose. And that smarts.

For the love of all that is good and holy, please put The Office back on iTunes!)