Boss Radio

Last night I was sitting half asleep in front of the TV, I'd left the fire on wa-a-ay too hot and the room was all swimmy and a bit like a video of a shed somewhere in the everglades, and the cat leapt onto me.

As usual she managed to immediately tread on something really delicate, but I was too blasted to care, I managed a half-hearted stroke or two, but it wasn't enough, she wanted a full blown skritch-of-the-chin and if I wasn't going to do it, then she'd dang well do it herself!

To this end she started scratching her chin on a tin bus that holds biscuits which is (Was) balanced on top of a huge pile of magazines which I'm still wondering whether to list on Ebay or just give away on Freecycle. On top of this box was a TV listing magazine and alongside it was the remote for the TV. Over went the tin, taking the magazine and the remote with it.

The tin and the magazine wound up on the floor, the remote vanished.

I searched. I looked in all the logical places that it might just have slipped, I dug my hand into all kinds of nooks and crannies that it could never have fitted into, and then I dove though all manner of rubbish that there is no way it could have hidden under. In short, I left no stone unturned and no turn unstoned. I looked everywhere twice, and in some places thrice.

It 'ad gorn, and never called me mother...

Around mid-day today I finally grew tired of leaping up and down to change the volume and the channel, and I got really tired of not being able to adjust the screen size to match all the various ratios they broadcast stuff in, and I searched again. After all, I knew because logic dictated it that the damfool remote had to be somewhere, and not just any somewhere either, it had to be in that somewhere just there.

I crawled around the floor, peering under chairs and tables, feeling inside soft things, and generally making myself look like an idiot. Then I gave up.

Obviously the remote had gone to visit its relatives on the remotoid planet which these things all come from. I was going to have to replace it.

Have you ever tried to replace a remote?

When I went to the manufacturer's website to look up the ref. number of the controller I wanted they tried to fob me off with a 'universal remote' which had what looked like a million buttons on it and cost vast sums of money. When I tried a remote finder website it took so long to find the list of TVs that I had to choose from that the computer kept timing out. Finally I had the good sense to try Froogle and found myself in a morass of genuine and generic remotes all guaranteed to work with TV sets with a model or serial number almsot, but not entirely, similar to mine. I decided to go for the real thing, after that it was just a matter of finding which was the cheapest.

And that's another thing.

Why is it so hard to find out what the postage charges are going to be? You have to pay them, buying the product and then not having it sent to you would just be silly, so why don't most websites give the shipping charges with the price? Some sites you have to almost order the item just to find out what shipping they're going to charge. I couldn't be bothered, I decided that if the postage costs weren't listed somewhere easy to access I wouldn't bother with that store.

And that's when I found a site with not only a cheap genuine remote, but free delivery as well. It was with no little relief that I bought the snutting thing and threw myself back into my chair, exhausted with my toil. My mother enquired what I was getting so hot and bothered about. I told her I'd just ordered a new remote. She asked if I was sure I'd searched everywhere for it. I told her of course I had, there weren't that many places it could have gone, it would have had to have gone here, or down here...

I grabbed the remote for the VHS and demonstrated how a remote would fall. "See?" I shouted triumphantly as it fell to the floor in full view. Then I went to pick it up.

I don't need to finish this story really, do I? You know that seconds later the remote returned from visiting its relatives, completely unaware of the bother its disappearance had been causing us. It was down a little gap between another chair and the magazines that I've got stacked up, I'd checked down it numerous times.

There could be but one explanation. There was a portal to another world down there.

I rolled up my sleeve and thrust it down into the gap. The gap was only aboutthislong, my arm is at leeeeeast thiiiiiiis looooonnnnnnng.




I swear my hand went right through the floor as if it wasn't there...