Areas of Unrest

11 May 2008 - Pushing Buttons

It is not surprising that my mother knows exactly how to push my buttons. After all, she installed them.

While she enjoyed seeing Young Frankenstein (which I thought was just okay) and she loved the boring coffee shop I found for lunch and she was even reasonably enthusiastic about her local Japanese restaurant and she was happy that I taught her how to use Favorites in Internet Explorer, she still managed to spend roughly 33 of the 37 hours I was at her house complaining. I admit that I am extrapolating to the sleeping hours, but it's a fair guess that she was dreaming of ways to criticize me. (I, however, woke up last night in an odd panic, convinced that there was a squirrel in the bedroom. Don't ask.)

Here is a typical example. The VCR is not displaying the time. It turns out not to be displaying the time because it only displays the time when the power is off (and displays the channel, instead, when the power is on), but this has to be somebody else's fault. So I solve this problem pretty quickly by pushing the VCR's power button (after the typical altercation in which she asked me to fix this, I told her I'd do it as soon as I finished the last 3 pages in the chapter of the book I was reading, and she yammered loudly for the next 20 minutes keeping me from being able to read until I screamed at her enough to get her shut up for 5 bloody minutes). But it turns out the time was wrong. And her VCR is designed badly and she took the instruction manual apart into individual pages which she paperclipped together in random order so it took some effort to actually find the instructions. (She tends to do this to instruction books because she thinks this makes it easier. But she never actually tries to use the instructions and all it does is annoy people like me who try to find them.) At any rate, her VCR is not well designed and you have to hold down little buttons on the remote repeatedly, which she can't do because of her arthritis. It took me all of 3 or 4 minutes to get things working right, but I needed about an aspirin a minute.

I am happy to be home where there is no deafening television on and no little old lady screaming at me over it. And no squirrel in the bedroom.