There Is Something Wrong With The Remote

To a six year old, the background music and the opening sequence was chilling: "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. WE are controlling transmission"... And the finale: "You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to...THE OUTER LIMITS".

Something I will never forget watching as an on-the-edge-of-my-seat six year old in 1963. And something that I will never again allow my pet rock to watch. Not when I'm not home and a remote's within reach.

Seymour, as blog readers know, is my pet rock. Seymour loves the TV-DVD, and has figured out the necessary elements of the remote control ("on-off"). I didn't give it much thought, not being much of a TV watcher the past few years. Besides, Seymour's a rock. What trouble can he get into?

Don't answer that.

I naively figured I could let Seymour watch marathons of stuff while I was on the computer, or away at work. Well, one weekend, I let him watch a two day/night marathon of The Outer Limits (TOS), figuring that the way he hides from all sorts of "booger men", some of the creatures thereon would have him hiding under the loveseat.

I didn't reckon on Seymour's ingenuity and misplaced sense of territoriality.

I came home one Sunday evening to find quite the mess about the living room (moreso than my usual): a set of my tiniest screwdrivers were strewn about, along with little bits and pieces of assorted *stuff* that I would learn were "leftovers" from a disassembly/reassembly process.

And there, on the coffee table, sat a 'new-look' DVD remote. One, Seymour indicated with pride, would not only operate everything in the apartment...it would defend it, too.

Me: "From what?"

Seymour: "From pteryaductyls...triciploplotz...yeti...and all those...those THINGS on The Outer Limits!"

Righhhht.

Now, I have some suspicions over the years about certain unexplained things, like when a pizza delivery was awaiting me one night, and I hadn't ordered it. I laid it off as a prank caller, and bought me a pizza.

I'm beginning to think that Seymour set me up.

But never like this...it became quickly apparent that Seymour had transformed my simple DVD remote. I pushed the 'on' button, and the TV came on...and the DVD...and the stereo...the computer...every light in the place...the oven..the microwave.

Even the friggin' toilet flushed.

I pushed the 'off' button, and I was standing in total darkness. Even the microwave LED clock went phffft. As did the green lights on the smoke detectors.

Okay, so the rock has learned priorities when I'm in the kitchen, but I digress.

Now I'm concerned...especially when I ask Seymour "what works what?", and all I get is a..."ah..er..I forget". This had "really baaaaaad evening" written all over it.

For example, while spending some time trying to figure out what the 'menu key' now did, I got a knock on the door, and opened it to find a local police officer: it seemed that my patio light was sending out international Morse Code, in sequence with my pushing the 'menu button'. What it was sending out, in code, was an obscenity in Spanish. Yes habla neighbors across the lot were not amused to be reading code that said that about their mamacita.

While Seymour sat there on the coffee table, with that inscrutable "pay no attention to the pet rock on the table with all the tools" look.

As I was explaining to the increasingly incredulous officer what my pet rock had done to the remote, I inadvertently directed the remote toward the kitchen, and hit the 'mute' button: a bright beam of light shot out the end of the remote, vaporizing the refrigerator.

After a moment of silence amidst the smell of ozone and fried leftovers, the officer shook his head, and with a terse "I didn't see a thing", left the apartment.

Currently, Seymour is on 'time out' on the patio, and being reminded that those sudden dashes of light across the night sky are space rocks that acted bad, and are burning up in cosmic detention. And there'll be no more DVD time for Seymour, or anyone else that visits here: not until I figure out how to safely undo all the what he dun to the remote.

Not to mention, how I'm going to explain to property management the scorch mark in place of a now missing apartment, across the hall. At least it was an unoccupied one.

I think.