Remote Controls

This post could also be entitled “When I was young I had to walk 5 miles to school, naked, in the snow, uphill, both ways.” Or “We are so spoiled”.

Last week our television remote started acting all wonky. We would be happily watching a show, get the urge to see what else was on, change the volume or fast forward through a commercial, and suddenly the remote would not work. The little red light on the remote would blink, but no blinking was occurring on the DVR unit itself.

Ok, this has happened before. We just need to change the batteries—or not. We changed the batteries, and it worked for a few uses, and then it would stop again. So we started taking the battery out of the remote every other time we touched a button. Annoying, but workable for a while. And then it happened. I was joyfully watching my taped episode of Project Runway when a commercial came on. Of course I hit fast forward, and waited for the episode to restart. Then I hit play. Still fast forwarding. I hit play again. Still no response. Then I decided to press stop. It is still on fast forward. Now I am concerned, and trying to figure out how to do this with my eyes closed, so I won’t know who was auf’d before I see the episode. I get to 10 minutes left in the episode when it finally occurs to me to walk over to the DVR and turn the thing off by hand. Why did it take so long? Because we are spoiled, spoiled, spoiled. Not only do we not have to “suffer” through commercials any more, but we don’t even have to move from our chairs while not “suffering”.

When I was growing up my brother and I were the remote controls. My dad would suddenly decide to see what was on, and my brother or I would be planted next to the television while my dad said “flip it, flip it, flip it.” The time each channel was actually on the tv was about 2 seconds. We would usually go though the “entire” line up of channels several times before settling on one. At least until the next commercial. Fortunately, the entire line up was probably only 20 channels or so. All this manual channel changing may have had something to do with the fact that I didn’t watch much television growing up. (Not really, I just wasn’t all that interested.)

My son just doesn’t know the torture he missed out on. In fact, I think if I tried that with him he would just look at me like I had 2 heads and walk off. I think I should try it some time just to get his reaction. Hmm. Now that I think about it, I wonder what my dad’s true motivation was. He never really watched much television.
By the way, we have a new remote courtesy of Cox. Thanks Cox.