I Was A Teenage Remote

                                                      I Was a Teenage Remote

“Ciiinnnnnddddyyyyyyyy,” came the bellow from the living room. It travelled about eighty feet from the den to my room, causing me to scramble up from the floor and tell whoever I was talking to on the phone to hold on. (This was before cell phones or even cordless phones so the phone I was talking on was attached to the wall). I was fifteen and I was busy talking to my friends and I had just been what I liked to call ‘rudely’ interrupted.

I wondered what my dad wanted as I hoofed it down the hallway, hoping I wasn’t in trouble as I went over the past few days in my head to see if anything would count as being trouble.

With my heart pounding I came to a screeching halt in front of my dad’s chair, “Change the channel, Boy.” (Since he didn’t have any boys, he nicknamed me Boy).

“What…I came all the way in here to change the channel,” I grumbled as I shuffled over to the TV. You see, back at that time there were no remote controls so anytime the channel had to be changed, someone had to get up and bodily do it…and that someone was usually me or my sister. Dad rarely ever asked mom to do it. Mom was always the ‘queen’ of the house, which is the way a man should treat a woman, but us kids were peasant servants.

I don’t mean to insinuate he was a bad dad because we thought he was the best dad…we were just typical teenagers and we didn’t like to be beckoned eighty feet to change a TV channel.

I guess it could have been worse. When my dad was a teenager, TV’s were just making a debut and not only were they a hot new item, there was also no cable. Can you imagine no cable TV?
The only way to get a channel at that time was to use an antenna and you could only get one or two channels at best. This meant someone had to get up on the roof to turn it if the picture was not good and I’m sure my dad was that person since he was an only child.

I can remember the time before cable when my dad had to get on the roof and move our antenna.  I was only about eight or nine then and when he was on the roof, someone had to be looking at the TV and someone else had to stand at the door to tell him when the person looking at the TV said it was a good picture. It could be a long process because weather and the wind always factored in to make it a hard or easy task.
Poor Daddy got up on that roof many times in the rain and a couple of times in the snow.

I guess I should count my lucky stars I got to change the channel in the warmth of the house.
Technology is great. We’ve come a long way since my days of being a teenage remote.