How do you define the king of your castle?

Is it the person who is more Type-A personality?  Makes the most money?  Highest educated?  Biggest feet?

In the animal world, the king of the castle boils down to  things like dominance…or age…or having the most silver hair on your back (Hey, I might win that one!).

But in our human world, it is simply a matter of possession…….

The King of thy castle shall be thine whom holds thy TV remote.

It’s true—if you hold the flicker in your mits, you control the world!  (Or at least your little corner of it.)

That explains why it’s such a power struggle.  Hell, in my home we have more citizen revolts than a Latin American country.

“What else is on?”

“I don’t want to watch this.”

“You’ve already seen this.”

“Can we change the channel?”

And don’t you dare put the remote down till your show is over.  Personally, I’ve sat there holding the flicker (and my bladder) till my eyeballs were floating!

This bickering battle over control of the remote explains why we have a TV in every room in our home (much to my chagrin).

Flicking Style

Everyone has his or her own way of using the remote.

I am rather traditional in that I turn on a program, watch it till completion (including the commercials), then find something else to watch.

In contrast, my oldest pilots the remote with reckless abandon.  He can simultaneously watch something on 40 of the 60 channels we receive.

His fingers move in hyper-drive like Mary Ann after she ate the radioactive sugar beets on Gilligan’s Island.

I have to look away from the TV as the flickering images send me into a retching, convulsive shock!

It got so bad I had to get a new remote as the friction of his fingers wore off the numbers and words.  That wouldn’t be a problem if you have the buttons memorized like he did.  But I, on the other hand, would press the wrong buttons and end up watching the “history of the hack-saw”, picture-in-picture with the test pattern, with closed-captioning in Spanish.   It was awful!

Closing

Me and the remote.

When it comes right down to it, I don’t like having control of the TV flicker.  I fold under the pressure of finding something that appeals to everyone in my home.  While some wallow in the power of remote ownership, I would much rather forfeit my rights and let someone else control the idiot box.

Then, when it is finally my turn, I’ll try to finish watching that program about the hack-saw.  Una sierra es una multa diente de sierra?