My husband gets nervous whenever I reach for the TV remote.
“Hey, what do you want with that?” he asks while I’m still three feet away.
“I’m just going to change the batteries,” I tell him. “It hasn’t been working well, lately.”
“Maybe not for you,” he mutters. “It knows you.”
I finish changing the batteries and hand the thing back to my spouse. But just as it changes hands, something goes wrong with the TV show he’d been watching.
I am adamant: “You see that? I swear, I didn’t touch a single button! It’s just determined to make me look bad!”
This happens a lot. We have six different remote controls — well, five, actually, once you realize that the white one is for the air conditioner — and to be honest, I only understand one of them. And even that one not too well.
Worse yet — the misunderstanding seems to be mutual.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ll be watching something together, and I’ll pick up the remote — sometimes to freeze the picture, but sometimes to make it a little louder — and suddenly we are watching a cooking show… or a car race… or a screen that says “You are not authorized for this channel,” and my husband says, “What have you done this time, Judy?”
Which is a stupid question because if I could answer that, I would not have done it.
I am not fond of the remotes. Making things worse, we seem to need more of them every day. There are just too many options! Netflix; FX; Amazon Prime; HD; HDMI; HTML…
“That last one is a software code, Judy.”
“Well, what isn’t, these days? But tell me — why must there be so many remote controls?”
“It’s very simple, really,” my husband says. “There’s just one remote for each appliance: the cable box; the DVD player; the TV screen… You can tell from the brand names. It’s nothing to do with the channels.”
“Oh yeah? Then why does this one have a big red button in the middle that says “NETFLIX”?”
“Oh. That’s because we bought a Smart TV.”
“Not smart enough,” I tell him.
“It’s very polite about you,” he replies.
Now we keep all the remotes in a basket, beyond the reach of anyone sitting on the couch. And I treat them like sleeping snakes, or unexploded ordnance. Except for those times when I need to see the captions, or pause the show.
Recently, I did a very bold thing. I left the basket and the TV behind entirely, and went on my computer in search of a show — and I found it! Thank you to every one of the family and friends who told me I needed to watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which can be accessed (like everything else in the world) on Amazon.
Not only did I find it, but I loved it. It’s funny; it snaps along; and it is somehow a depiction of life in the 1950’s that does not leave me fuming at all the sexism, but laughing instead. For that, alone, it deserves every one of the five Emmy Awards it won the other night.
Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge is brilliant. But I haven’t yet seen her deal with a TV remote. My husband, on the other hand, grew up with them. And not just for the TV.
Apparently, in the Long Island suburbs of his 1960’s childhood, no family home was complete without its garage and garage door. One day, his parents got a new remote control opener for the door.
But the precocious child I would someday marry had a question for his Dad: “How good is the security on this thing? Will it open everybody’s door? Or only ours?”
“Don’t worry,” his father said to reassure him. “This won’t work on anything else. Only ours.”
He aimed the remote at a neighbor’s house. “Watch, I’ll prove it.” And he pointed and clicked… and they watched as the neighbor’s garage door obediently opened.
You’d think that incident, alone, would have taught my beloved not to trust the things. And yet, somehow, he always blames me. I can’t imagine why. It’s not remotely my fault.
