Win, Lose, Draw

A few years back, our TV decided to be contrary and insist on being handled through the remote only. If you had the nerve to actually walk over and push it's buttons, it would choose all on it's own what it wanted to do. "Oh, so you want me to turn the volume down, do you? Well how about I change channels instead."

We got lucky and had a month left on the warranty, so we called in the TV doctor (who still makes house calls, yo) who told us that the part we needed is no longer available and we're just out of luck. The nice thing about warranties is that they cover when bad stuff happens like that. We got refunded the full paying price of the television. Suh-weet.

As long as we used the remote, we had no problems. Until yesterday. Now the television has decided that it doesn't want to be ignored. Ever. It won't turn off. Not manually, not with the remote, not happening. We've taken to pulling the plug to get it to be quiet. (If only kids came so equipped, you know?)

In order to avoid mega headaches dragging the entertainment center away from the wall to plug and unplug that contrary beastie, Sam plugged the TV into the bottom outlet hole. When he built our home, he wisely put all the bottom outlet recepticles in the living room on a switch so that we could plug things like lamps and Christmas decor into them and turn them on and off with one simple flick of a switch. (Yes, my husband is brilliant that way.)

I've mentioned before how Micah has a thing for Dark O'clock on occasion. One of those occasions is first thing in the morning. One simply cannot watch television at the crack of dawn with lights on. That would be silly. And wrong.

So Micah came downstairs to pay homage to his onscreen friends. Except what ho! The TV didn't turn on. I showed him that a light switch now controls the magic, and he would have been happy except that I have a lighted topiary plugged in on that electrical circuit.

Lights!

Highly unacceptable. He turned the lights off. And off went the TV.

GAH!

He turned the TV back on and as he went to check to be sure that it was flashing colorful pictures at him, he saw those lights were on again.

NO!

Off went the lights, off went the TV. On went the TV, on went the lights. On, off, on, off, round and round the mulberry bush...

In the end he decided that it was better to watch TV with the glare of purdy lights than to watch no TV at all.

Life is full of hard choices.

6 comments:

Flea said...

... and full of cute puppies

Karen said...

I would have loved to see that. We had a TV mess with us that way too. It's thing was it would turn off when you told it to and then turn itself back on some random time later. For awhile, I wondered if we had a ghost.

Karen said...

Karen - that would freak me out. Especially in the middle of the night.

caramama said...

Ha! Those choices in life can be so hard.

And when that TV stays on even when you've unplugged it? Time to call in the exorcist. Or just get rid of it.

Burgh Baby said...

I wish everything in life came with a switch. I'd be willing to suffer through some topiary lights for that.

Anonymous said...

Hard choices indeed! I would love to know what the dialogue in Micah's head went like during that!