Universal remote

How does this dumb thing work?

I pointed a black plastic box at the television.

Nothing happened.

Well, not nothing, exactly. 

Eventually, a red screen came up, and then some pictures cascaded past. The effect was frustrating. Nothing I clicked would bring them to a stop. 

“Give it to me.”

My daughter. My savior. My technological sherpa.  

She pointed and pressed buttons, and the movie started to play.

The only thing that could make her appearance at that moment any more perfect would be if she stopped jamming her socks in between the couch cushions, where the remote controls, spare change, and granola bar wrappers usually tend to migrate. 

“If we had Alexa or Echo you could probably do this yourself.”

She said “probably,” because she’s never used a smart home device and doesn’t know its full capabilities. Could it feed the cat? 

Do you know how I managed before having children? 

It’s not a rhetorical question. My daughter would like to know. She refuses to believe that I was ever capable of changing channels on my own. 

Maybe it is wishful remembering.

When I try to think back, the only vivid memory that comes is the notebook I carried around like a bible during the early days of personal computing. I could never keep track of all the ways basic commands like “colon, copy, backslash, backslash, alt, shift, command” that combine with individual letters from the alphabet - say “S” - to make computers do things ... like, turn on. 

I like to think times were simpler back in the day, especially once I discovered Apple computers and their intuitive engineering. I must have blocked all those nightmarish memories of trying to start up a mainframe and create a word processing file from scratch.

“Never say ‘back in the day,’” my daughter pleads, shuddering from head to toe as if I had said, “Let’s be 'twinsies' and wear matching clothes.”

That aside, I refuse to admit that I never knew how to work the television. 

The red button turned the set on and off. The Volume and Channel buttons went up or down according to the corresponding arrows. Number buttons existed, too, but with fewer than two dozen channels, no one ever used them. 

And when you lost the remote in the couch you could get up and turn a knob. 

Though no one ever did.

Back then televisions didn’t do fancy things like take note of your “favorite” channels, or record shows when you’re at work. 

Not that I don’t appreciate all the bells and whistles.  I just wish I could go back to the days when my television didn’t “lisp.”

“Oh, I fixed that for you,” said my daughter. She adjusted one of the knobs I had no idea was at odds with another knob on two different machines that work our entertainment hub. 

“When the volume of the TV competes with the volume of the home theater system the actors all sound like they’re lisping or slurring their speech,” she explained.

 I don’t believe I recall seeing a section on remote control detox in the owner’s manual. 

The idea that two different volumes could make a single soundtrack play almost harmonically is a phenomenon I wish could just go in one ear and out the other. 

 The reverberations scrape at my eardrums like an over inserted cotton swab.

“How is it that I mess this up every single time? I used to be good at this stuff.”

My husband, who appeared out of thin air like magic when I uttered those fateful words, laughed:

“Honey, you were never any good at this stuff. You once tried to use a universal remote to turn off an alarm clock.”

Oh man, I almost forgot about universal remotes. “Those dumb things never worked.”