Remote Wiz Kids

by John Christmann

“Back when I was your age, I had to walk to the TV to turn it on.”
I actually said this to my son one evening after he asked me to hand him the remote control, which was resting two feet away on the coffee table.

I believe that there are a few traditions that must be perpetuated by parents. One is indulging your children against your better judgment. Another is instilling in them a deep understanding that back when you were a kid life was much, much harder. Even if it wasn’t. I happen to love the “back when I was your age” stories because they have been so well crafted over the years. To my pronouncement that I had to walk to turn the TV on, I appended the necessary exaggeration that it was in the middle of winter, the house wasn’t heated, and that it was up hill both ways.

But underlying the joy of telling whopping white lies to skeptical children is the sad truth that I did have to walk to the TV to turn it on. You see, I was born during a time when there were no computers, no VCRs or DVDs, no cell phones, no Gameboys—not even Big Gulps. All of the cool technology back then was big and lumbering—things like rockets that carried men to the moon and fast cars that raced across the Bonneville Salt Flats. That kind of technology had little impact on me directly. I still twisted rubber bands to make airplanes fly. I still placed playing cards in the spokes of my bicycle and pretended I was breaking the land speed record.

When I was little, a friend of mine, who’s Dad had cool machines like a riding lawnmower and a snow blower, got a new color TV with a remote control. The remote was very heavy and went thunk whenever the buttons were pressed. It worked by sound. When the remote went thunk, the TV turned on and the dog barked. But it worked—it could power up the TV, change nine channels, and adjust the volume. That’s all it needed to do. And it was built of steel so it would never break. Which was good because we had to jump on it in order to depress the buttons.

Sometime during the four years I was recovering from hangovers in college, digital technology took over the world. By the time I graduated, there were TV remotes that controlled hundreds of features and changed hundreds of channels. And there was all kinds of expensive junk with blinking red lights and untamed cables that could sit on top of the TV. Things like cable boxes and VCRs and thermo-nuclear reactors. They called this collection of electronics the Entertainment Center, presumably because the Clutter Center didn’t sell as well. For a long time my Entertainment Center consisted of a large TV, a remote, and a beer. Since remotely delivered electronic Budweiser had not yet been invented, I didn’t use the remote much, and eventually lost it somewhere in the stack of unpaid bills and newspapers that lay piled next to the TV. So I walked nightly to the refrigerator and to the TV. It was uphill. Both ways.

Shortly after my wife and I married, we bought a new TV. I remember the first night we sat down to enjoy a movie on the large, crisp screen of our brand new Sony Trinitron. I walked to the set to turn it on. There were no buttons. None. I went outside and rummaged through the empty box, which was still sitting in the driveway. Inside was a large couch made of Styrofoam, under which I found a thin remote control unit and a lengthy user manual.

In the first chapter, “A Tour of Your Television”, I found two diagrams with tiny lines labeling the important features, functions, and controls of my new Sony television. The first diagram showed the TV. There was one line pointing to it that said, informatively, “TV”. The second diagram looked like a spider web. In the center was a picture of a small remote control device. On the outside of the web were tiny hieroglyphic-like markings. I had to hold a magnifying glass under bright lights to decipher them. The User Manual immediately went up in flames.

But I learned that in order to work my new television, I was at the mercy of one tiny remote. With advancements in technology, this new remote was lighter, smaller, and contained twice as many buttons as older versions. I learned that I could program the TV to turn on and off 128 times during the day. I learned that the buttons could be re-programmed using a software tool that came on a disc that was packaged somewhere under the Styrofoam couch that had just been taken by the trash men. I learned that the remote was more powerful than the first computers used to put man on the moon.

The remote had something like thirty-eight buttons. The buttons had scary markings like Power, Enter, Last, and Mute. Some had different colors, with labels underneath that warned of even more ominous conditions like Reset, Escape, and Terminate. I learned that these buttons were “function” buttons that doubled the remote’s button capacity to seventy-two. The buttons were so small that my fingers always pressed two at a time. So for me, there were effectively nineteen buttons. It didn’t matter much. I was too afraid to push any of them.

The remote worked fine until the cat sat on it one day and a black bar containing Spanish subtitles appeared across the bottom third of the TV set. I couldn’t get rid of it. I turned the TV on and off. I replaced the batteries. I even threw the remote at the cat. Nothing worked. So for two months we watched TV with a Spanish-English dictionary until the cat sat on the remote again and magically reprogrammed it back to its original state. After this we physically taped the remote to the TV set. When we wanted to switch channels we would walk uphill to the TV.

We managed to keep the remote safe this way until our oldest son reached the age of four, at which point he was also able to reach the TV. He quickly became adept at working the remote. When he was six he programmed the TV to turn on and off 128 times a day. When he was seven he programmed it to automatically jump to the Cartoon Network three seconds after any channel button was pressed. I watched an entire episode of Star Trek Second Generation one evening by continually depressing channel nine to avoid repetitious interruptions by Scooby Doo.

Even with the addition of two more children we were able to keep that remote alive for many years using advanced technology like Duct Tape. But it eventually had to be replaced after my younger son tossed it to me one evening and it landed in the fish tank. So with a great deal of trepidation, I went out and bought something called a Universal Remote.

A Universal Remote is just what its name implies: a remote that controls the universe. It is more powerful than the super computers used to remotely control space vehicles that no longer carry men into space. When I read that scientists had witnessed a new supernova, I knew that the cat was probably sitting on our new Universal Remote. But despite its complexity, I rest easy because it is usually lost.

One day my son said to me, “Dad, there should be a remote for the remote. That way I could access the remote, even when I can’t find it.”
“What happens if you lose the second remote?” I asked.
He thought for a second, and then lit up: “I know, we could attach the second remote to the TV so that it is always in one place!” he said.
“Wow,” I said. “Or maybe they could actually put buttons right on the TV set.”
“They could do that?” my son asked, wide-eyed.

While we waited for these advances in technology, my son suggested that I tape my cell phone to the remote so he could call it and listen for the ring whenever the remote was lost.

A few days later there was a knock on the door. A man wearing a black suit wanted to talk to me urgently. He was from the FBI. Apparently my daughter had called the FCC demanding that Hannah Montana be put on the air immediately or she would press the red button that said Terminate.

When I went to talk to her she was standing in front of the TV holding my missing cell phone, which was glued to the remote. She was pushing thirteen on the phone—the 1 button followed by the 3 button—thinking she was selecting the Disney Channel. I picked up the phone and listened.

On my phone the number thirteen is the speed dial number for wireless customer support, which I call periodically to understand what all the buttons on my cell phone do. The phone rang and an automated voice response service answered: “If you wish to speak to Public Affairs, press One.” I pushed 1. Another voice prompt informed me that I could reach Government Liaisons by pressing Three. I continued to press 1 and 3 working my way through several voice prompts until a human picked up the phone. It was the assistant to the Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, DC.
“I want to watch Hannah Montana or I will press the red button,” I yelled into the phone.

I was informed that this was no longer funny and that the FBI had been notified. I replied that this was, in fact, very funny and that the FBI Man himself was with me at that very moment laughing, even as he was placing me in handcuffs. And then I asked if the FCC had Prince Albert in a Can, and hung up.

I tell you all of this because the other night as I was fetching the remote control for my son and instilling in him a deep understanding of how hard things were when I was his age, I came upon a very important observation: Children are just tiny remotes that control the big hulking entertainment centers they call Mom and Dad.

My kids are the latest in remote technology. They have dozens of buttons that execute commands like Get, Fix, and Find. These buttons are further programmed with function keys like Milk, Computer, and Homework so that I won’t be limited in what I can get, fix, or find. And my kids are not afraid to push a button if they don’t know what it does. Their lives are filled with trust and optimism. They don’t worry if Spanish subtitles appear or a star blows up in a distant galaxy. If something goes wrong they can always press the Undo button and I will fix everything. I am, after all, a Universal Dad.

Even so, being lumbering technology is not so bad. At the end of the day they still hug me before bed to remind me that, despite advances in remote technology, there are still some important functions that can only be accessed by walking over to the TV set.

One day I will be obsolete. My kids will be gone, and the only buttons they will press are the two labeled Send and Money. But that is OK. They will have the latest and greatest remotes of their own. And they can say to their kids, “When I was your age, I had to use my fingers on a remote with no heat, pushing the button down, both ways.”