Cursed Tongue: Stop Pushing My Buttons!

Posted by CursedTongue on June 16, 2006

My husband is a card-carrying nerd, Lord of the Rings reading, Sci Fi-loving technophile. There was a time when I could add Mt. Dew guzzling to that list, but he gave it up because he decided he would like to have some of his natural teeth when he gets older. It often happens that we have to hammer out his need for items with hard drives and silicone chips with wants of mine for frivolous things like curtains and patio furniture.

Last week he turned to me and said he wanted, nay needed, a Digital Video Recorder. “It’s a business expense,” he chimed, because he works with digital video. At the risk of opening myself up to a fresh round of technological wants, I’ll admit that a lot of the time it’s really difficult for me to say no.

I’m sure my family can vouch for me having my digital camera attached to my hand during holidays. In fact, I love my camera so much that I secretly hope it accidentally plummets into the Grand Canyon when we visit, so I can get a new one; one with more megapixels and optical zoom.

There was a time when I was young and delusional, and anxious about removing the housing on my computer, incase I might blow something up. It was during this simpler time in my life that my husband declared his need for a PDA (that’s Personal Digital Assistant, not to be confused with a Public Display of Affection). He drooled over the public display of electronics, while I rolled my eyes and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The heady plastic fumes released by scads of new gizmos filling my nose and made me woozy.

“If you get one of these, I want jewelry,” I said. Entranced by a tiny, sparkly LCD screen, he agreed. He turned the device toward me and put the mini-notebook sized wonder in my hand. I took up the stylus and when I wrote my name in the letter recognizer, it appeared type written on the screen. In that moment it was all over.

Do I have a pair of sapphire earrings? A jade pendant? No. But I have an Axim, my sweet little bundle of megabytes, my organizer, my day planner, my light in dark places, my forever notebook until the battery goes to the big electronics mega store in the sky. It replaced my previous electronic organizer, a Casio My Magic Diary, a gift I think I received for my 12th birthday. I could be wrong though, because it was around that time that I began relying on electronic devices to remember things for me.

My husband decided he would rather have a new bigger, better, faster computer, so he never bought a PDA for himself. A couple of days ago, I walked into an all too-quiet room to find him hunched over my Axim, stylus clutched in his hand. At the time, I failed to notice the shifty way he occasionally glanced at his surroundings. He occasionally jiggers with the settings on my PDA, so sometimes I can access our wireless network and sometimes I cannot. And other times he just wants to play solitaire. So I wasn’t worried until he said, “You know, this PDA could be turned into a universal remote.”

A universal remote control is one of the items on his electronic thingamajigs list of demands. Not the $15 ones that are much like regular remotes, except that they can be programmed to control all of your entertainment equipment (my husband assures me it would not work as advertised, thus prolonging our careers as remote control jugglers. He claims he needs the $180 universal remote with the touch screen to take the street performance feel out of our living room.)

Yesterday, my husband entered the living room armed with my darling PDA. Although I believed I was watching something, I must have been mistaken because he proceeded to change the channel with my PDA. I protested, and was informed that the down button was ineffective. I used the actual remote, the one that came with the TV, the electronic accessory that doesn’t have my calendar and address book and embarrassingly dreadful poetry and all of the measurements for our house on it. I recovered the object of my TV viewing pleasure, but apparently it appeared as though I had the TV on in order to waste electricity, because my husband tried the mute button.

The testing of what has evidently become my husband’s new remote was during last two minutes of the show I wasn’t watching and, of course, I missed the ending. (I get the husband Grunt of Indignation if I ever dare to talk during one of his shows, but it’s perfectly all right to interrupt my shows because they stink. It’s part of the Man Watching TV in the Forest Axiom: “If a TV is on in the forest and there’s no man around to watch it, does it really make any pictures or sound?”)

If he decides he likes the 30-day software demo he downloaded onto my PDA without consulting me, the software will cost him $15, the exact amount of a universal remote, which I am not entirely convinced would be the useless lump of plastic with buttons that my husband claims it would be. I think it’s a plot to persuade me to agree to spend $180 on my husband’s dream remote. And it’s working because I really don’t want to expose the little multitasking light of my life to pizza grease, and the competitive sport of coffee table diving.

- Sarah Letnes

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