Not Remotely Understanding the Remote

This week, the lost Lenore of the New York Sun is working on a column about her befuddlement when it comes to navigating her TV remote. So, here's what I got to say about all that...

Personally, I'm not much of a Jay Leno fan and my interest in Letterman waned after the 80s (they're all DINOSAURS now, have you noticed?), but anyway, I do recall Leno telling a good story about his parents (whom he often mined for some of his best material) and the TV remote. Seems they were still bothering to change channels by hand, which totally mystified Jay. "Why don't you use the remote?" he asked. "Well," his mother replied, "We wouldn't want to wear down the batteries." "Wear down the batteries? In a remote? Here, here's $10, you'll have working batteries til the Rapture," or something to that effect, but Momma Leno was undaunted. "Oh, I don't like to use a remote. It might...might cause a fire." "MA," Leno lamented, "it's not a PHASER. If you miss the TV you're not going to blowup the vase," he said.

I found this humorous. That's as far as me and Leno go.

Beyond that, well, my pet peeve is universal remotes. You see these things ensconsced in plastic at the checkout line of every Target, Giant, Rite Aid and I have never divined just how any of them work. You bring them home and they universally don't work on anything. Maybe that's what is meant by universal remote. Universally ineffective. Personally, I think people (well, us old school dinosaurs who owned Texas Instruments calculators and played PONG when it first came out, and thought both were the zenith of COOL) approach their multi-functional remotes the same way they approach their multi-function cell phones. With the phone, you know you can program in people's numbers, but you can't figure it out, so you just punch in the numbers. You might be bright enough to text message. That's about it. You keep hitting the PHOTO button accidently and have now managed to fill up your phone with 4,239 weird angle shots of your office desk, car dashboard and assorted floors. Same thing with the remote. You know about the power switch and the button that maybe turns on your TV's DVD player, but you've given up trying to figure which combination of buttons always you to set up the TIMER RECORD so you don't have to stay up til midnight Sunday night watching ROBOT CHICKEN when you really need your 8 hours sleep. I know sometimes I hit a button and suddenly my TV screen has all this, this STUFF up on it, with strange symbols and markings that are either ancient hieroglyphics or have something to do with setting my picture color tone. Since I don't know what combination of buttons clears the screen and watching Sam Waterson berate some sleazeball defendant on LAW AND ORDER through all the orange and green glyphs gets annoying, I just turn the TV off (that button I can find) and read a book and that generally takes care of it.