Remember all my excitement about watching Modern Family from the beginning thanks to the modern wonders of syndicated repeats, DVRs, and setting said DVRs from mobile devices? Well, imagine my disappointment when I popped onto the DVR only to find that there were just 8 episodes of Modern Family sitting there, none of which was titled "Pilot", which I knew had been sitting there just days before.

Disappointment turned to anger and then joy - all within seconds - as I realized this was an opportunity to try something I had never done before:

I undeleted a show.

Actually, I undeleted a lot of shows.

Turns out, setting a series to record from the phone app must use the default recording settings.

Among those settings: the fact that the DVR will only keep up to 5 shows at a time.

We realized the problem pretty immediately. Also pretty immediately, the instinctual reflexes that I hope will someday kick in if I ever need to help save another person's life kicked in to rescue a TV show.

I opened the trash and there sat, among the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother and a couple of repeated episodes of Louie, about 10 episodes of Modern Family...including the pilot episode, around which my whole plan revolves. (Ed. Note: "Plan" = watching every episode of a hit television show four years late.)

One last note - one time someone who shall remain nameless was babysitting our daughters and turned off the recorder in the middle of a Parks and Recreation or some such show, by accident, and then, attempting to fix said deletion, proceeded to accidentally delete a bunch of the same shows already stored in the DVR. By the time we thought about looking into the trash to try to recover episodes it was too late.

I owe that unnamed person a debt of gratitude. If it wasn't for that experience, I would never have been able to react to this situation with such speed and grace.