UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROLS

A friend of ours recently had his 90-year old mother in town for a visit. Everything went fine except that after a few days he had to hide the remote controls for the television. In his house, you have to turn everything on using the silver remote control, then use the black remote to change channels and adjust the volume. It seems that no matter how often he explained that to his mother, she couldn't get the TV to work. Out of frustration, she would start randomly pushing buttons on both remotes until nothing worked at all. Even our friend, who is pretty good with technology, couldn't figure out how to restore the TV to working condition. They had to wait for their 7-year old son to get home from school, and he would get everything working again. This incident is more than just another cute example of an older person trying to cope with modern technology; this is an indictment of the remote control industry. What good is all of our fancy technology if we can't get it to work?
Our main floor entertainment center has 5 remotes: one for the TV, one for the blu ray player, one for the DVD/VCR combo player, one for the cable box and one for the receiver. For awhile we tried to use our equipment by grabbing the appropriate remote. This actually isn't that easy because the remotes aren't labeled "TV', "Cable Box", etc. Instead we had to check the brand of the equipment we wanted to use and then look for the remote with that brand name on it. That worked OK, except both our TV and DVD/VCR player are Sony's so there was an additional step of determining which Sony remote to use. It was very frustrating.
You can imagine how excited we were to see an advertisement for a Universal Remote Control. "Tired of having five remotes in your family room?" the ad said. "Our Universal Remote makes it so you only need one. Works with all brands!" We bought it and have to admit that things are better. Now, instead of having five remotes that we don't know how to use, we only have ONE remote that we don't know how to use.
I should have known the universal remote wasn't going to be that easy when the ad said that the remote control was developed using technology from our Apollo lunar space program. The advertisement failed to mention that it actually was easier to put a man on the moon than to get the universal remote to work properly.
You can't just buy the remote at the store and bring it home and start using it. You have to have a guy from the store come to your house with a laptop and special software to customize the remote to your setup. I've had it a couple of weeks now and it works OK except that sometimes pushing the "Off" button doesn't turn everything off. Usually pushing the "Off" button again turns the other stuff off, but not always. Then I push the "On" button a few times and then the "Off" button again. Holding my right leg in the air while I push buttons seems to help a little too.
We also bought a Universal Remote for our basement entertainment center. The remote works exactly the same as the upstairs one except it uses radio waves since a lot of the equipment is behind a door. It was working better than the upstairs universal remote except that sometimes it would randomly change the channel or fast forward through a movie we were watching. We called the store and they said we probably had a neighbor with a radio wave remote and his was interfering with ours. They said there really wasn't anything we could do about it.
I confronted our neighbor on the North side of our house and, sure enough, he also had a radio wave remote. Apparently we had dueling remotes that sometimes battled over who would get the final change. We were unable to work out a compromise so we ended up in arbitration. The Judge awarded us use of the remote on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays while our neighbor gets to use his on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We trade off on alternate Sundays.
I thought we were done with the radio wave problems but we were visiting with our neighbor on the South side of our house and they mentioned that lately their Microwave Oven was randomly turning off and on. I was going to ask them if this was happening on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays and alternate Sundays but decided not to get involved. If any Toyota executives are reading this, I recommend that the next time there is a case of sudden acceleration in a car of yours, check to see if there was anyone in the area using a Universal Remote.
David LeSueur lives in Littleton with his wife Mary. Please don't call us on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays because we are busy using our remote control.