It’s All About Directionality

I am taking something for granted recently.   I don’t realize I am until I start to be frustrated and figure out the problem is with me.   It’s all about directionality, or the requirement for directionality and my complete disregard for it.

When I was young, we had a television with a knob and a few channels.   Most of the channels on the knob didn’t tune in to anything other than white snow.   The way you changed the channel was to get up, walk over to the CRT and turn the knob.   A lot of times you’d have to mess with the antenna and/or horizontal and vertical hold knobs to get the picture clear.

Then, among other technological advancements heralded in during the “High Fi” age, we got the remote control.  If you were around then and remember using those devices, they were wonderful, although barbaric given today’s standards.

Then we had a problem with remotes.   And by that I do mean “remotes” in the plural sense.   We had one for every device.   Lounge chairs and furniture was sold that had special cubbies to hold all the remotes.    Universal remotes came around to help, but they largely were “intelligence separator” devices in so much that most of us were made to feel dumb by them.   We couldn’t work anything other than our own, home system, and sometimes even our own system was confusing.

But in all that time, you still had to point the remote at the thing you wanted to control.   Then, televisions got flat and were placed over mantles.   Components were dubbed, “visually unappealing” and needed to be hidden in cabinetry.   Pointing in the right direction to increase the volume could be a trick even the owners might have difficulty doing consistently.

Now we have is Bluetooth or radio frequency-based remotes that don’t have to point at the right direction and angle or even have to be in the same room to work.   I think it is the closest I’ve ever been to remote-controler bliss.   I can hide the remote in the kitchen and pause or even turn off the show because otherwise, my children are not getting off the couch to come to dinner.

So it throws me off when I pick up a remote somewhere else, like the clubhouse fitness room, and can’t get anything to turn on.    Is it broken?   Does this remote work for the television on the pool deck and not the one in here?   Is the battery dead?   Oh…wait…I have to point it at the TV to make it work…never mind.

The Big Boy Update:   I was putting my son to bed several nights ago and asked him what he wanted to do the next morning.   He told me, “I want to watch Transformers and one of your shows where they talk a lot.  The one with the orange inside the house.”  I had to think about this for a minute and then I realized what he meant.  I said, “oh, you mean NCIS.”   If you haven’t seen the show, the interior of their office is done in bold oranges.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Behavioral study.  My daughter has participated in some research studies in the past.   We do this voluntarily.   Usually they’re fun, non-invasive and interesting for me, as the parent, to see what’s being studied.   My daughter returned for a series of tests (games) one year after she did them today.   It was great to see how she’d changed in those twelve months.   Some things, like her impulse control, are the same:  she can wait until asked to take something she wants.   Other things, like repeating a series of notes, she can do at more length than she could last year.   Some things she didn’t understand at all one year ago but did them without even thinking about them this year.   The head researcher is getting her doctorate in the fall so we won’t get to see her again.   We wished her luck.