Father Knows Best: The Remote

Stef is partial to guitar playing rock and roll bad boys. Some day she’ll discover it’s the geeks who will inherit the Earth.

color-bars.jpg“I’ve got a problem, but you probably can’t help.” It was Stefanie calling from California.

As always my parental response was, “Is everything alright?” There are, after all, a myriad of problems I probably can’t help with. I’d rather not think of most of them.

“I pressed something on the remote control and now the TV screen is blue. It says ‘No Signal’.”

Tech support! I can do that.

She had been using the remote for the DirecTV tuner, but I asked her to pick up the one for the TV.

“I didn’t touch that one,” she said.

It didn’t make any difference. That was the one we were going to use to fix the problem.

In her younger days Stef would have continued to push back. Not this time. She picked up the TV’s normally unused remote.

I had her find the input button and read the choices: TV, HDTV, Input 1, Input 2 and so on.

“You want either Input one or two,” I said. “Don’t go too fast. It might take a second or two after you punch in the right one.”

After around ten seconds I heard, “Greg, you’re amazing.”

Yeah.

Unfortunately, remote controls are pretty dumb devices. The receiver built into the set looks for the proper codes without error checking. An errant signal from the DirecTV remote was received by the TV and translated to an action as if it were sent on purpose.

When the screen said “No Signal” I knew the TV had been switched off the satellite tuner. It was probably looking for an old fashioned signal on its antenna jack

Stef is partial to guitar playing rock and roll bad boys. Some day she’ll discover it’s the geeks who will inherit the Earth. Meanwhile, the TV’s back.