There is a special place in hell...

What is the most salient fact about remotes?

All remotes.  The one for the TV, the one for the VCR, the one for the DVD player, the ones for the cable box, stereo system, back-up VCR, and whatever other gadget's hooked into your home entertainment center.  What is it they all do?

Right.

They hide.

They hide between the cushions, they hide under furniture, they hide in other rooms after they've tricked some forgetful member of the family to carry them away from where they're useful to someplace where they have no function, like the bathroom or inside the refrigerator.

They make a point of never being where you last left them and where you need them to be at this instant.  They have an evil habit of changing places so that whatever remote you put your hand on first is never the remote you need right then.

When they aren't hiding or disguising themselves or otherwise making themselves scarce, they fail.

They let their batteries die---and what's the most salient fact about batteries?  They are never on hand in the right size and number when you need to put new ones in something.  Never.  Doesn't matter if you were just at the hardware store, drug store, or supermarket yesterday and picked up a pack or three.  You didn't pick up AA's or C's or D's or AAA's, and whichever it was you forgot to buy, that's what you need tonight.

Or they just die.

So, really, the salient fact about remotes is that at least half the time they are useless.

Many, many times, too many, you need to operate the TV, the VCR, the DVD, whatever, by actually leaving the couch, walking across the room, and putting a finger to the device.

Given this, doesn't it make sense then to design home electronics so that they can be operated by hand?

Isn't that something you would keep in mind when you are designing such devices?

Apparently not if you're working for the company that made our DVD player.

Our remote died.

Nope, wasn't the batteries.  Amazingly---impossibly!---I had on hand a whole package of brand new AA's.  Changing the batteries didn't fix it.  Neither did the trick of taking the batteries out for 30 seconds and letting the remote clear its tiny little brain of whatever gobbledygook has caused it to forget how to operate the DVD player.

It's dead.

And our DVD player is not designed to be operated by hand.

Oh, there are some buttons on the front of the thing.  You can turn it on and off by hand.  You can start up a DVD and you can stop it.  But you cannot get through a menu.  There is no button that will move the cursor or whatever you call it on a DVD from option to option.  All you can do is hit play, which should be fine, if all you want to do is watch a movie from beginning to end.  But there is no getting back to the menu once you've started, except by shutting everything down.

There is one other button, labeled search, that does not search.  What it does is randomly run through all the options on the DVD, pick one, and stick you with it all night long.  The nine year old pressed that button by mistake and so we watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan tonight with subtitles.

English subtitles.

There is a special place in hell for engineers who spend their lives designing things that cannot be used the way non-engineers use them.  There are lots of those things.  Hell will be crowded with engineers, including the morons who designed our DVD player.

Their punishment will be to be tied down forever on sofas in front of big screen TVs with an array of useless remotes on the coffee table in front of them and their favorite show eternally just about to start.

Now, when I'm alone and some piece of electronic equipment fails, I will futz with it and futz with it and futz with it some more.  I will futz with it all night if I have to.  But I will futz with it.  And I will, eventually, get it working.

But none of the other people who live in this house share my patience when it comes to futzing.  The three other people in this house, who shall remain nameless, cannot abide my futzing.  If something isn't working right, there are, as far as they're concerned, only two options.  One, throw the offending device across the room, curse it, and storm away to find something else to do.  Or, two, live with the problem.

I didn't even bother to suggest pausing to let me futz for a bit.  We watched the movie, they enjoyed it all the way through, and I enjoyed it after the first 20 minutes and I'd gotten used to the subtitles and persuaded myself that I could stand to hold off on my futzing until after everyone went to bed.

They're in bed.

I'm going to go futz.

By the way, I bought one of those universal remotes this afternoon.  Apparently it is misnamed.  It is a universal minus 1 remote.  It cannot be programmed to work our DVD player.

Unless I didn't futz with it long enough earlier.

Hmmm....

I think I'm going to be up until dawn.

Futzing.

Comments

[The Heretik]

The remotes hide out with the socks that get lost in the laundry

[grishaxxx]

My remotes don't go hiding that often (though they are under my strict command - no other users), but when they do, for their perverse little reasons, and I have to fall back on manual controls, it's eyes and tininess that drive me nuts.
Eyes - farsighted, always. And the better one is astygmatic, and changes its angles.
Tininess - small labels on controls, worse than the sidebars in WIRED, usually some pale gray-on-black surface, and I don't aim kliegs at my players very often. I have magnifiers scattered around instead. This makes me feel ancient, and I'm not.
And, yes, limited access through the buttons - all you'd need is one marked "Menu" and a few "<"s and ">"s, but no.... Inelegant.

It adds to my work-duty that my patient can't work her remote for her cable - it certainly looks universal, but it goes to sleep on the TV function, so she can press and press and nothing happens. Her (truly ancient) fingers can't find those mini-buttons - and I know when the Volume goes sky-high that she's found the only thing that works for her and it's wrong and - just for safety - needs adjustment so I can hear her.

At least I keep all my manuals in one place - there are functions I've never explored, like turning my own room into a disco, and I shall leave them that way.

Batteries - evil buggers - I won't even address.

Just hope I can catch The Incredibles tonight....

It's been a long, long week.

[bitchphd]

Oh, please do like my husband does and fix the remote with masking tape or duct tape that will peel at the edges and collect grime from people's hands and be sticky and revolting so that every time you use the thing you have to go scrub your hands, but the sticky goo is somehow waterproof so it doesn't really come off but just makes your hands feel really revolting all night long. Please do that. Because that's so fun.

[Linkmeister]

You forgot the telephone battery. Why, when the damn thing goes into "battery low" mode, must you then charge the replacement for about 16 hours? You are thus without a principal means of business communication unless you don't change the battery until 1800 hours, and I defy anyone to remember that little problem after picking up a new battery at the local Radio Shack.

[Morgaine Swann]

I feel your pain. My remote for my DVD player has been missing for months. I can access anything except the basic "play" function, and it's driving me nuts. I have a universal remote, but damned if I can get it to work with anything but the TV. Ain't technology grand?

[Exiled in NJ]

I only found out my DVD player remote could do things when I popped in "Body Heat" [not for your family night, Lance, please] and I realized I was listening to it and reading English subtitles. Maybe they were to help me thru William Hurt's mumbling or talking to the window with his back to the camera, but I did not think I needed them, so I began pressing these tiny buttons with my fat fingers and finally, somehow, the subtitles disappeared, but they reappear every time we try to watch it.

[Lance]

Dr B,

While I appreciate the virtues of duct tape and have often used it for quick repair jobs, I am not addicted to the stuff and always treat it as a temporary solution to buy me time while I figure out how to actually fix the problem. You need to look into the possibility that Mr B is a secret member of the duct tape cult and if he is have him kidnapped and taken to a Home Depot home repair workshop for deprogramming.

I wasn't able to get the old remote working again, but I did manage to program the new universal remote finally. It's a bit mulish and somewhat erratic but it works. I'd planned to use it only until I could find a truly compatible new remote, but all the ones I've found on the web cost half as much as some new DVD players.

I shouldn't be surprised. It is the plan of the electronics industry to make all home appliances large and small disposable. I wasn't supposed to go out and buy a new remote. I was supposed to go out and buy a new DVD player.

[Jenny K]

I think that whatever engineer decided to have the menu navigation buttons on the remote for my TV/DVD combo unit double as volume buttons, making it impossible to change the volume remotely while I'm accessing the DVD menu, deserves his/her own special place as well. Although it doesn't to be as bad as the special place for whoever decided that because everything has a remote now, nothing needs more than an on/off switch on the actual machine.

[Anne Laurie]

Just had to speak up in defense of those poor subtitles! Neither my hearing nor my husband's is as good as it once was; current cinematic trends towards REALLY REALLY LOUD special effects, and television's ever-greater reliance on ever-louder laugh tracks, makes it difficult for us to make out the words over the explosions. I greatly appreciate subtitles, and DVDs that don't include English subtitles lose points. For example, I loved Joan of Arcadia, but I haven't gotten around to buying the first season DVD box yet, because it's not subtitled. (Also, I hope Les Moonves will drop dead, preferably under horribly embarrassing circumstances, before I give him any of my money.) On the other hand, I bought the RESCUE ME box as soon as I dropped the first Netflix disc into my player and made sure that I could READ the dialogue I'd miss hearing. Given reports that the generations following the Boomers are ruining their hearing earlier and more catastrophically than Pete Townsend ever could, I'm guessing (hoping) that same-language subtitles can only be a Coming Trend.