This story will mean nothing to those under 32.
The Bit TV was in our finished basement, a large room with brown carpeting, a pair of beige corduroy couches, and a big coffee table made from a giant piece of driftwood. In a family of 5 everyone has their preferred place in the room and mine was lying on the floor in front of the TV mostly because I had bad eyes from the start and didn't always wear my glasses. It think this also because as the youngest, I was lowest on the totem pole and, therefore, the the human remote control.
The first TV remember had a knob. In the beginning, I would sit up and twist the sticky knob to the right channel. As I got older, I learned to change it with my foot. Because I sat the closest, I was often in control, unless my brother was there in which case, changing the channel with our prior authorization would result in being pummeled. It was my sister, however, who learned how to trump my control. She walked over, stepped on my leg, put the channel on the station she wanted and then, to my absolute astonishment, pulled out the knob and walked back to the couch.
Check mate.
Smart girl, that Michelle.
This basically resulting in wrestling matches for the knob (and she's go the ripped earlobe to prove it). Then the knob would be hidden in order to avoid such brutal confrontations.
Problem here is that you did not want to A. Forget where the knob was or B. Not have the knob in it's proper place when Dad came down to watch TV. STRESS ON B.
Eventually, I started steal the knob and thought I was pretty smart. But she trumped me again. She stole into my father's workshop and took his pliers and changed the channel by using those. And then, of course, you had to sit on or hide the pliers. Which resulted in Dad getting pissed off at us not only for stealing his navy-blue socks (we needed them for our school uniforms and were forever losing ours) but for his pliers as well.
After a few years of this, the knob was long gone, and the pliers were permanently attached to the TV set.
He finally bought us a new TV set: with a remote. A new battle ensued: I sat close to the TV and changed the channel with my toes (even though I was NOT supposed to be barefoot) and my sister sat on the couch behind me and changed the channel back with the remote. When the positions were reversed and I was on the couch with the remote and she on the floor, my sister, STILL smarter than me, learned how to cover up the remote receiver with her foot so I was powerless. I had to watch a lot of Solid Gold and no Smurfs.
My best friend at the time, Christine Wolford, had CABLE. And in the beginning cable came with a long, low box with all of the stations laid out left to right. There was a metal switch that you would drag to the right channel. The fun part of this was to zip that switch from one end to another and see if you could pick out anything on the way -- no remote would ever change channels faster than this thing. My parents didn't get cable until well after Thriller was showing at 9PM every night on MTV, a fact which rendered our house uncool for playtime. Unless you were interested in making mud pies in the woods.
When I was living alone in Virginia, I lost my remote. Sitting four feet from the TV, I was disinclined to get up and change the channel by hand, so I taped together a series of straws in an attempt to created an giant, extended finger to press the Channel Up button. I quickly accepted it was fine to watch the same channel, which is how the Law & Order addiction started. I blame the USA network.
I won't start on the number of remotes we have today -- enough jokes have been told about the idiotic complexity involved in turning on the television. All I'm saying is that wrestling for the remote has eliminated an artform because now there is no other way to change the channel and therefore there is but two options to gain control: negotiation or brute force. And I can tell you which would have ruled in our house growing up.
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