These days I have a devil of a time laying hold of that six-inch long piece of equipment that constitutes my manhood. I suspect I’m not the only husband and father with this trouble. I bet lots of men roam their houses, in desperate frustration, searching for the TV remote.
Just as he needs a comfortable chair, set squarely before the TV, a man need his scepter of entertainment power, preferably programmed to skip anything educational and the various Lifetime channels.
With three boys and a grown-up woman in the house, I don’t get charge of the remote very much. This is a hard knock, but I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve learned to be satisfied with a few minutes of executing my will over the TV after everyone has gone to bed, on the nights when they go to bed before my time is up.
“The remote? Why would you need that? The TV’s already tuned to cartoons.”
What drives me up the wall is when I finally get the TV to myself and there’s no remote to be found. Since it’s technically the cable remote, I can’t even change the channel manually. I’m stuck watching Ninja Turtles as my reward for outlasting them all.
They all have their different methods of losing the remote. One routinely takes it to a different room, where it no doubt also controls the toaster. One loses it underneath couch cushions. One throws it into a toy box.
I caught on to all these tricks and was renewing my acquaintance with televised sports when Big Man began his own love affair with the device. Big Man doesn’t care what channel the TV is on, but that remote is just full of fat, juicy buttons to push, and some of them do things to the TV that make his family react in the most hilarious ways.
Guarding your stash is a 24/7 job. Handcuffs for trespassers are optional.
My wife is a self-proclaimed, part-time hoarder. On the other hand, she hates clutter. She reconciles these positions by stuffing her hoard into cupboards and baskets. This issue would not be related to my difficulty locating the remote except Big Man seems to have inherited these contradictory conditions from her.
He has a little cache behind the stereo where he keeps his prized possessions. His prized possessions are objects that caught his attention for a minute, until he decided it would be fun to drop them into a hole. He has a second cache behind the kids’ chair in the living room. In these caches can be found Leap Frog toys, plastic soldiers, the tail section of a Mega Bloks helicopter, a good portion of my once-pristine CD collection (with or without cases), and something I spent most of a Saturday afternoon looking for so I could watch something besides Peppa Pig for a damned minute.
Oh well, TV is overrated anyway. Maybe we should investigate some more intellectually fulfilling pursuits, like reading to each other or going to family hoarders’ therapy. Maybe we could just relax and listen to some nice music. Oh wait, where are my CDs?
Snoozing on the Sofa 
O M G! What a topic sentence! Funniest thing I’ve read in quite a while. Be careful though…..CDs do make good Frisbees for small people……
Glad you got a chuckle out of it. The CDs might as well be Frisbees with all the miscellaneous crap jammed into the CD player.
Ahaha! So funny. I think you need a locked room with a T.V. and remote in it. Mr. Gibber does not ever let that thing out of his site and if for any reason I do get a hold of it, he has another as back up.
We have three TVs in the house. Can I find a remote to any of them?
Ha! You’d better get a safe to lock them in then.
It’d probably be easier just to give up TV.
Let me know how that goes! lol
After I read the first paragraph, I was tempted to make a snarky comment about the dimensions of your equipment. But, I got out of Junior high over a half century ago.
On a more mature note, I have ofen thought they should make remotes like cordless phone head sets;, a button on the cable box you press and the remote beeps until you find it.
Exactly. I have been thinking the exact same thing for some time now. However, whenever I try to explain to anybody, they ask, “What’s a cordless phone?”
[…] the suggestively titled Where have you hidden my manhood this time?, he speaks honestly about the vacuum he faces when the one thing that truly defines his manhood is […]
Awe, aren’t they cute when they’re asleep? There is nothing worse than getting all setup and not being able to find the remote. There’s only so much jumping into muddy puddles a man can take before he snaps. Also, mine is much bigger than 6 inches, my friend. It’s a universal!
We’ll just call you Mr. Universe. I like having one I can easily fit in my hand.
Scott, I feel like I leave the same comment time and time again; hilariously excellent! And this time I get to add that I knew you were talking about the remote immediately. I’m feeling a little sad about that. What has my world come to? 😉
You cracked the code. Now I have to be careful about complaining that the buttons on the remote are worn out. You might think I need the little blue pill.
I keep telling everyone in our house that we need a “beep beep” thing on the 4 different remotes we have that all control something. One of them, the key one, disappears from time to time in couch cushions, etc! Last week, it took us 2 hours to find it…. I need something installed on all remotes that we can click our car keys lock button to make everything beep.
REMOTE LOCATOR… how does this not already exist?
I’m considering duct taping a phone to the remote so I can just call the phone whenever I can’t find the remote. That would the most useful thing I could do with a phone.
Hahahah! There you go, the same kinda idea I had with the beep beep of the keys. 🙂
Snoozing, I can so identify with all of this. In fact all my best CD’s are now frisbees! Now… where’s my remote?
It’s probably under a couch somewhere, having coffee with mine.
I always hate when that happens, but at least it’ll have company. :O)
Maybe they’ll watch some TV.
But, only if their batteries don’t run out first. 😀
Or you can just blog.
I can’t let them know the computer is useful to me or they’ll hide that too.
Wait my friend, they are going to take control of that very soon. Which is why I blog at work. Scrap that, I meant to say late at night.
Yeah, lots of people blog “late at night.”
hehe. So you do it too?
Of course not! It’s 11:30 p.m. here right now.
I’m giggling like a Nun discovering a heap of carrots.
I’m always amazed by what nuns find funny.
Having a sense of humor is important. Especially if you look like a penguin.
Laughing throughout this post, I am so lucky now that I only have the husband to contend with when it comes to the remote. No kids. Lots of cats though, who thank goodness could care less about remotes. In trying to watch a movie with said husband a tug of war ensues who is going to “man the remote”. *sighs* It’s usually the man who ends up manning the remote yet it is I who end up pleading to please turn up the volume a smidge so I can hear! Forget it when he is surfing. I won’t even be in the same room with him. What IS up with that anyways? 😉
With three boys running around the house, I haven’t heard the TV in years. I have to interpret what’s going on by the pictures. If the boys are quiet, my wife turns it down way low because somebody must be sleeping.
Somewhere I saw that there are these headphones that you can wear to hear the TV. No one around you can, just you. Now if only I knew where to send you in order for you to see what I saw, :(, I wish. Yet I did give you a clue. Remote headphones for TV ….
These things are tempting, but I am the father of three children. It’s dangerous for me to begin to believe it’s possible to relax or enjoy myself.
Are you enjoying yourself now? Hmmmmmm ……
Of course. And, in fact, I enjoy myself 99% of the time I’m with my kids – just not always in the ways I had intended.
I think you need to beg the cable company to give you an extra remote. Which you hide in the drawer where you keep your … Which you hide up high in your closet, Scott.
Just imagine us fighting it out with dual remotes. Family harmony goes down the drain.
Yours would be for when they all retire for the evening, is how I envisioned it. But if you want to play rock ’em, sock ’em remotes, hey now, Scott.
You have to admit, it would be entertaining watching them wonder how the channel keeps getting changed back to sports.
Yes, that would be priceless, Scott. 🙂