Now If They Only Made One For The Wife

Gentlemen, get control of your clickers! You know what I’m talking about- the TV remote. We have lost a lot of ground over the last few years when it comes to being kings of our castles. Nowadays, we do dishes, cook an occasional meal, baby sit and change diapers. I’ve even heard of a few guys doing laundry; all things that our fathers would have never dreamed of doing. Well, it’s time to draw the line. We may not rule the roost anymore but by George, any remote device should fall within our jurisdiction.

It’s not like the clicker can be shared anyway. One person’s got to be in charge and it might as well be the man. A woman’s role should be limited to search and discovery only and not involved in actual remote operations. Search & discovery would entail helping me look for a lost clicker between the cushions of the couch, under the chair or in the refrigerator where I sometimes leave it when I’m making a sandwich.

And just like everything else, clicker operation has become more and more complicated and it requires a certain mechanical expertise that many women just don’t have. We recently purchased one of those new DVD/VCR/CD/MP3/BLU-RAY/BOO-RAY players. The player itself only cost $189 but the wires, jacks, adapters and batteries for the remote brought the final cost to somewhere around $600. It would have cost more but I got my twelve year old nephew to hook everything up instead of hiring a certified electrical engineer.

Now the remote for this thing is the size of a laptop computer and with as many buttons as a space shuttle dashboard. With so many buttons, there’s no room for full descriptions underneath each one of them so they use cryptic abbreviations. One button has the letters UMMPH underneath it. The first time I pushed it, all the toilets in the house flushed at the same time. There’s another button marked BARF. I’ve never had the courage to press that one.

To complicate matters, in today’s living room, it requires more than one remote to actually watch television. You need one to turn the TV on, one to turn the satellite or cable box on, one to turn the VCR or DVD on, and one to turn the stereo on if you’re audiophilic enough to have figured out how to hook it up to the TV. And to make matters worse, we have three TV’s in our house & the remotes are always getting mixed up. Throw in a garage door opener and a ceiling fan remote and you see how confusing things can get. I spent thirty minutes the other day trying to turn the TV on with my electronic stud finder. I have to admit that the only one in the family that can tell the difference between all these remotes is my daughter. When she’s not home, and the remotes get mixed up, I just grab a good book.

So you see that control of the clicker is of fundamental importance in any household and it shouldn’t be left to chance or first come first serve. I’m not usually in favor of prenuptial agreements but a legal document might be the only way to prevent long term marital discord. A man without clicker control is nothing; he has no authority and might even be forced to watch the Lifetime channel on a regular basis. The only people that would deny a man his remote are communists, feminists and Al Qaeda terrorists.

So in my house, I am in total control of our viewing choices. And when I get home tonight, my daughter promised that if I let her watch the “She’s All That” marathon she’d show me how to get the Braves game on satellite without opening and closing the garage doors.