Innovation is great, things get better, smarter, sleeker, cleaner, and overall improve your experience until they don’t.
When I was a young lad, we had a TV (a colour one mind you, before you make some jokes about my age which is increasingly becoming a sensitive topic for me), but it had big ugly chunky buttons on it. I’m sure some hipster will say it’s retro cool these days, but no, it was just plain ugly. There were two big sliders on it, one controlled the volume and the other the brightness.
We also had a similarly ugly video player. If my parents were watching a movie and they wanted to forward a part, they would call me, and I would sit on the floor and hold the fast forward button until one of them would tell me to stop. In a way, I was their remote control. That was until they got a real remote control. It was a wired one and had only a few buttons on it, but it was ugly, and the cable trailed across the room. Once the novelty wore off, I think they put it in a drawer and resorted to calling me any time the tape needed to be forwarded.
Nowadays, things are so much better. Not only do the TV’s look a lot nicer, but there are hardly any visible wires, and the remotes control absolutely everything.
Except, the other day I was sitting in the good bit of the sofa, where the cushions have adapted to my shape. An ad came on and I tried to skip it… but nothing happened.
I pressed the button harder. This is the first stage of all my technical investigations.
Then I raised the remote above my head, as though the signal might travel business class if I gave it enough altitude. Nothing.
Fully accepting I’m well past middle aged, I adopted the pose that most men my age are familiar with. One arm fully extended, body leaning sideways, face suggesting we are trying to land a plane rather than skip a YouTube ad.
I finally thought to myself that I’d just get up and do it manually. Even though it would defeat the purpose of having the remote.
But before taking those 3 and a half steps, I took the batteries out and put them back in.
Still nothing.
So I got up making old man sounds and dragged myself to the TV only to realise there are no buttons on it. There’s this tiny joystick type controller at the bottom which can be used for some things, but definitely not to skip a YouTube ad. I doubt it could be used to rewind a VHS tape, or change the channel. It seemed to just be able to turn the TV off, on, and change the inputs. Makes the TV look super sleek with no visible buttons, but pretty useless for the things you probably need it to do.
I think I owe the ugly TV from my childhood an apology. Because whilst it was ugly, it was perfectly functional. Functionally ugly… fugly.