Yesterday my boss arrived at work, dug around in her purse for her keys to let herself into the building, and was surprised to see her TV remote in there. That's when she realized that in her morning rush, she'd inadvertently grabbed the remote instead of her cell phone... which happened to be sitting right next to the remote. When she left at quittin' time, she wondered aloud about what kinds of long distance calls her dog must have made in her absence ;-)
The mention of her dog reminded me of Ron and Debbie's late doggie-- Sammy. Apparently one weekend while they were out of town, leaving the dog to his own devices (see, unlike kids, dogs can do well on their own for a few days-- leave them some food and water, and they're good to go!), Sammy accidentally stepped on the remote, turning the TV on. Further actions-- maybe playing with it? -- caused the volume to go up. Way up. It got so loud that not only did it scare poor Sammy, but the neighbors actually called the cops because of the noise! The cops had to break in and turn off the TV. Who knows how long the TV was on before Sammy was rescued from the clutches of the noise pollution! ;-)
We're so attached to our remotes. Makes you wonder how on earth we managed to survive in the days of TVs that had knobs you had to manually turn. I remember growing up watching one of those small B&W models with the... what was it, 13? channels. That was before we moved into our house, and our living room apartment was so small we sat close enough to the TV that sitting up and reaching out to turn the knob wasn't too inconveniencing.
Why is it that when the batteries on a remote run low, we respond by pressing the buttons harder? Do we somehow believe that the weak connection will work better if we exert untold force on the poor buttons?
Amazing, isn't it-- in the span of just a decade or two, we've gone from the non-existence of remote controls to now having to keep track of 3 or 4. Let's see-- the TV, the VCR, the DVD, the stereo, the DirectTV console... yeah, it adds up. No wonder we're so attached to our clickers, we become virtually unable to function without them. Just like Ralph Drabble above :-)
It's the same here! We've gone without cable for over 3 years now (it came free when we lived in the university's family student housing, and when we moved out, we simply never signed up) and instead rely on Netflix and Hulu to supply all our TV needs. Now that we have our own house, one of Allan's first purchases was a big flat-screen HDTV! Since it has built-in Netflix and Hulu software, everything's available to him with the click of a... well, clicker :-) He spends as much time glued to the TV now as when we had cable. Me, I'm usually reading a book or maybe playing on the computer-- catching up on blogs and FB)
ReplyDeleteMust be a guy thing? :-)