And The Battle Rages On....

In most homes, there's a flipper battle. (And let me take a brief aside to clarify what I mean for those of you who use wrong terminology for the flipper. I'm referring to the remote control that you use to power the television. It's a flipper. At least in my house.)

From what I've heard, the husband usually wins this battle. He controls the remote control, flipping through channels at random anytime a commercial comes on or he's otherwise bored. Don't think you're watching the whole way through The Terminator or seeing an entire baseball game uninterrupted. There are three other baseball games on at the same time, and -- unless there's a no hitter going on in one of them -- the man must watch all of them as simultaneously as he can. He rests no more than two minutes on a single game before moving to the next one.

Not so in our house. In our house, we have an entirely different battle of the flippers. Observe.

Yep, we've got two identical flippers to control a single television.

Now, we didn't start out intendeding to have dueling flippers. We originally only had one. But then our new tv started acting funny. I got the black screen of death a few too many times (think computer blue screen of death except ummm black). After sending out a guy to repair our new tv twice, the nice people at Vizio agreed that we had a defective television and gave us a new one to replace our icky one. When they took the old one away, they didn't want its manuals. Or the extra flipper.

So now we have two.

This means that when my husband turns the volume up to 22 when the wee ones are sleeping, I can just quietly pick up my flipper to turn the volume down. Or when something we didn't intend to record starts recording and my husband is panicking trying to figure out how to stop it, I can calmly put things right. Or when he starts flipping the channel too often, I can flip back.

At least, I can do that most of the time.

You see, my husband typically goes to bed later than I do. And when I head to bed, I set my flipper on the coffee table in front of me so that I can easily access it when I next need it. Sometimes, I even put it in the drawer, and everything is all neat and uncluttered.

My husband, however, is from the family where the flipper belongs with the tv. He'll pick up my flipper at some point and put it... here where I found it this morning.



Or he'll move my flipper over here, like I found the other flipper this morning.



Or he'll have it in the kitchen. Or it will be buried in a couch cushion. Or on top of the mantel of the fireplace. I even found it in our bedroom once and once in the dining room.

One positive from this is that at least he doesn't try to blame it on the wee ones. He knows better. While I've successfully trained them to leave the flippers be or put them on the coffee table, I've yet to have any impact on my husband's habits.

And really, with two flippers, you'd think I'd have a chance at being able to easily spot a flipper when I need one, right? Not so much in our house.

Putting the flipper underneath the television is the one that cracks me up the most though. The whole point of having a flipper is to avoid having to go up to the television and change channels -- and yes, I've had televisions where I've had to do that. Back when there were three channels and then the U for the other two channels that supposedly were out there but were almost impossible to tune in (my family didn't get cable until 1986, I believe, and even then only one television had it). If you're trying to avoid walking up to the television and pressing buttons, why do you put the flipper where you must walk up to the television? At that point, I'd rather do it manually.

On the plus side, I'm sure I burn off a few calories each day looking for the wandering flippers.