Oh-ho, the remote....It brings back a particularly painful memory of a
long weekend a long time ago. I was brand new to cable television, and
had trouble making the set do the things I wanted it to do even *with*
the remote. Then my boyfriend (now my husband) went away for some work
related project for a few days. He was esentially unreachable for those
days. We had only been living with ferrets for a week or two.

Needless to say, rubber fever inspired by tiny little buttons moved a
ferret to swipe the remote. It was gone, gone, gone in a very big,
rambling Connecticut farmhouse full of all manner of interesting nooks
and crannies.

Now, I could turn the TV set *on*, but for the life of me, I could
not make the thing change channels. This was not a technology I was
familiar with. I could get precisely one channel. One channel for those
three days. I believe it was called the "Style" channel. If you are not
familiar with it, imagine a TV channel devoted exclusively, twenty four
hours a day to documenting the eating disorders of female celebrities,
the horrid clothes that allow their bones to stick out, (I once
described one of these outfits in this forum as looking like Mr.
Spock's bath mat) the expensive restaurants they frequent, but
apparently do not eat in, the criminal histories of their boyfirends,
and the exclusive places they go to recover (sort of) from drug and
alcohol addiction. Endlessly, as if on a loop. Watch it long enough,
and it becomes apparent that at some point, they *swap* abusive,
criminal boyfriends who neglect and abuse them by turns. The only
good conclusion I could draw from it all was that they weren't taking
in enough calories to breed very sucessfully.

I didn't know about the FLO in those days, but if I had, I would have
walked out onto the lawn with a white hankie on the end of a broom
handle and surrendered unconditionally.

Alexandra in MA

[Posted in FML 5478]