Mom struggles with new remote

My mother stared at the new cable remote the way the ancients must have stared at a solar eclipse.

For a minute, I thought she was going to run into her bedroom and slam the door.

But the powerful demands of another glowing pagan god, the 42-inch Toshiba flat screen, exerted an even greater pull and my Mom is convinced she’ll perish without Diane Sawyer in the morning.

Thus, we began the ritual warfare where the impatient offspring must teach a techno-phobic elderly parent how to work a harmless battery-powered device that 5 year olds work the way Billy the Kid did Colt .45s.

Really, I think I could get through the process if only I were allowed to shout profanity. I’d be fine if at my breaking point I could just dash out on the porch and deploy echoed f-bombs from the fifth floor balcony of the Pittsburgh high rise where my 76-year-old mother nests.

But, I swear, I can’t swear because if I did she’d think I was swearing at her not the situation and that would break my heart. Plus, even if she did understand my rage was aimed elsewhere, she’d say, "Now, you know I don’t like it when you use that kind of language,” and I’d turn into a little boy again and feel that peculiar sort of shame that 46-year-old potty mouths like me really should be over.

Like most sons, I love my dear white-haired mother. But that kind of love is fraught with challenges in a world that keeps zooming past at warp speed.

See, she didn’t need a new 54-button Comcast remote. But the recent switch to digital required Comcast send her a new receptor box. I drove the hour from my home and installed it.

I was happy to. I take the kids, we get to enjoy time with grandma and I get to feel like a good son who responds to simple tasks with cheerful efficiency.

I gave her a brief tutorial that touched on only the most basic functions of the new remote.

Two days later, she called and said she’d pushed a wrong button and had been without the big TV since we left. She could still use the small boxy TV in the bedroom, but in today’s day and age I could get charged with parental neglect if word of that sort of cruelty ever got out.

So back I went that night. I used the TV remote to key the set to channel 3 (then hid that troublemaking TV remote). I handed her the new whiz-bang cable remote and resumed my simple instructions. It seemed to take and the two of us sat down to watch the fine 1998 movie, “Waking Ned Devine.” She loved it, although she scolded that she “could have done without all that profanity.”

Profanity? I wondered. I must not have been paying attention.

We hugged, I said goodbye and drove back home.

I called again the next day. It wasn’t working again. She didn’t want me to make that drive yet again but I thought of the poor dear forced to watch Good Morning America on a screen that makes the U.S. weather map look like a postage stamp. I said I’d be right there.

This time I took scissors, paper and tape. I cleverly, I thought, made an ingenious remote mask that concealed all the button clutter. Banished were “GUIDE,” “PIP,” “MUTE,” “ON DEMAND,” "AUX" and a host of other button functions she’ll never need.

I told her to leave the television on all the time and to never alter the channel or the volume. In a world with more than 700 channel options, I was convinced she could get by with just one.

It didn’t matter. Somehow, someway, she SNAFU’d it all over again (and she’d cringe if she knew the derivation of that witty military acronym).

I called Comcast and asked if they had a three button remote -- on/off, volume and channel. Really, that’s all she needs.

“This is a very common complaint with the elderly,” he said.

If it’s so common, why can’t Comcast do something about it?

“Well, the demand is for more functions and that’s not going to change.”

Oh, yes, it will. There is a rising appetite for simplicity as brilliantly exemplified in an excellent Wired magazine article “The Good Enough Revolution: When Simple & Cheap is Just Fine.”

A backlash is brewing. My mother, a woman with whom I entrust the care of my beloved children in a 2-ton motor vehicle moving at 60 mph, should not be made to feel like an idiot by her inability to turn on a television and watch basic cable.

And I shouldn’t have to drive once again to her home to remove the offending box and turn back the cable clock to two weeks ago when she knew how to work a simple remote, which I must do tonight.

“I’m so sorry for putting you through all this,” she said.

I said I was sure I’d put her through lots worse all those years ago.

A widow for five years now, she worries about being a burden to her children and the loss of her independence.

I pray to God that He’ll ease the tensions bedeviling her and other seniors struggling with unnecessary tech troubles.

And I pray the pagan tech gods in places like Silicon Valley will find creative and simple solutions to these sorts of problems long before my own kids are stuck dealing with me.

Buried by magazine subscription cards

I have a simmering gripe against the magazine industry that has nothing to do with their cruel rejections, their capricious edits and the dodgy pay systems that have me fantasizing about making nuisance raids on all their posh New York offices to steal things like staplers and coffee machines.

That’d fix ‘em!

Of course, that all goes with the territory for anyone who, as I do, freelances for a living. That is the price we pay for living in what one employed friend of mine derides as “the fool’s paradise.”

But that is not the thrust of today’s complaints. No, my gripe is once again on the selfless behalf of all humanity.

What’s bugging me is the ticker tape parade of biggie-sized confetti that flies out of the new magazines whenever I flip through the pages. It’s those stupid mail subscription cards.

Understand, I have a deeply vested interest in magazines succeeding. I need them to thrive so that they’ll be prosperous enough to hire guys like me to write panic deadline stories then wait up to six months to see the paycheck for a diminished amount that wasn’t on the contract.

So I’m in favor of any steps magazines do to increase readership and revenue.

But it’s a confounding silliness to believe that stuffing your product with these deforesting little annoyances results in any appreciable increase in readers. If they did, then each month, each magazine ought to be increasing its circulation roughly six fold until every person in the world was subscribing multiple times to every magazine.

Let’s start with Wired magazine, the techie magazine devoted to the digital age. In the entirety of the magazine’s 235-page December issue, I found just a handful of stories that didn’t involve something that needed to be plugged in to function. It’s a magazine that clearly seems eager to work itself out of business, or at least the print version of itself.

Yet that same issue included six nearly identical subscription cards for, I guess, their Amish readers who are culturally disinclined to go online to read or subscribe to a magazine that calls itself Wired.

Wouldn’t one strategically placed house ad/subscription card suffice? Of course it would.

But it’s the same with the golf, news, travel, regional, men’s, writer’s and New York magazines to which I subscribe. Note, I’m already a subscriber. They’re preaching to the choir. Maybe each think I have six reading friends for whom I’m going to shell out $20 for three years -- “A 3 Year Savings of $159.64! -- but that’s not going to happen. I don't have that many friends, the ones I have don't read much and, geez, who's got $20 to spare?

Of all the major magazines, the only one I know that’s renounced this wasteful practice is men's adventure magazine Outside's Go, a publication run by visionary and sensible editors who not only understand the cosmic import of this issue but also have had the wisdom to have twice employed me this year. So they’re all earth-loving geniuses. And I’ll bet they all smell nice, too.

I used to collect all the mailers from magazines that owed me money and drop the dictionary-thick sized stack of them in the mail every month or so. This meant they’d have to pay pennies of postage for each one returned blank. I was hoping the practice would bring these publishing titans to their senses.

It never did and I began to take pity on Mother Nature and our humble postal employees for the unwelcome burdens I was spitefully imposing to their already overtaxed systems.

As you can surmise, I’ve always been one of those nasty tack-on-the-chair sort of revenge seekers. I’m not proud of it, but I’m working on it -- and you’d better just stay on my good side.

So now I just toss them in with the recycled newspapers. Once read, the magazines I take to the local hospital for dispersal in all their godforsaken waiting rooms. Here’s another childish habit: if I have a story in one of the magazines I anonymously write “How insightful!” or “Witty observations throughout!” in the margins.

And I usually bookmark the page with a single subscription mailing card.

I’m just trying to be helpful.

So feel free to share your ideas on how we, together, can end this wasteful practice. Both constructive and malicious ideas are welcome so don’t be shy if something involves things like tacks on chairs or stink bombs.

It’s all for the greater good.