How’s this for stupid?
For the past three years or so – maybe longer – we have been
making do with substitute remote controls for our region-free DVD/BluRay player, made by Pioneer.
It’s a treasured device in our home as it can play both the movies we might
borrow from the library (or more rarely, rent), as well as those I brought with me to Australia nearly seven
years ago.
As good and as treasured as the device is, its remote
control was not up to snuff. It crapped out sometime in 2016 or 2017, though
that’s just an estimate – it could have been as long ago as 2015. I don’t
remember, really.
We resolved this issue at first with an app on our phones
that could control the device. This provided me no end of giddiness. Controlling
your DVD player through your phone? Crazy world.
But as both devices used the WiFi, and the WiFi did not work out in our garage, it left us without a way to remotely control the player when we
wanted to watch a movie there. We sometimes ended up playing movies
through my computer hooked up to the TV with an HDMI cable, but that didn’t
help with movies from America as my laptop DVD player is not region free.
The WiFi works better in our garage now, but that’s irrelevant
because the app no longer works. It won’t identify the device. I have no idea
why, even though I’m an IT guy.
But that didn’t matter because when we got our new smart TV
last year or the year before, the remote control for that suddenly started
controlling the DVD player, without us even doing anything about it. (My wife
says she did not set it up, anyway.) That worked great for a while.
And then, as mysteriously as it had come, it was gone.
Suddenly the smart TV remote had no effect on the DVD player, and the buttons
on the front would only work under certain circumstances, without explanation.
If you went straight to the play screen, you could usually get the movie to
start, but if you had to choose a language first, you usually could not. It was
just drop dead for those movies at that point. And I was starting to wonder if
this device might no longer be a viable part of our home entertainment
environment.
Don’t worry, I’m getting to the stupid part.
On Saturday we were doing a bit of a clean-up around our
kitchen, including long-neglected areas such as the top of the refrigerator.
This was where the original remote control the device had been collecting dust
and scum and hair over the years.
As it was a total purge of the unnecessary items on top of
the fridge, I flashed the remote at my wife and asked her if it was worth
storing in our box of other broken audio-visual odds and ends, like cables that
no longer do anything and adapters that no longer adapt. I thought it was, just
because I’m a hoarder.
She thought it wasn’t, but she also suggested something revolutionary:
“Did you check to see if it still works?”
Well of course it didn’t work, I said – you don’t stick
a working remote control on top of the refrigerator to collect dust and scum
and hair for three years. But the mere suggestion that it might
work put a little glimmer in my eyes, and I decided to go over and fetch some
charged batteries from the bathroom.
And yes, as you’ve guessed by now, it worked.
It worked fine. It worked without exception. Every button,
without delay.
Now, we’re not idiots. We did not just stick this remote
control on top of the refrigerator because its batteries died. It definitely
wasn’t working, at one point.
But the evidence surely speaks for itself that we called its
time of death prematurely. And even with three years of dust and scum and hair,
and with the same set of now-definitely-expired batteries potentially corroding
a hole in its insides, the remote works better than ever. Who knows, maybe
the dust and scum and hair helped.
I’m trying not to dwell on the stupidity of the whole thing.
Anyway, there was no way I was not going to take the remote
for a spin immediately, having had to use imperfect workarounds for at least
three years now. And it was probably that reason more than any other that I
opted to watch Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time, on Saturday
night, as mentioned in each of the past two posts.
There’s something so sweet and simple about being able to
insert a DVD into your DVD player and not only know that it will work, but that
you can pause it if you need to, without having to get up from the couch and
press a button on the front. And there isn’t even a pause button on the front,
so what you really had to do was stop it and then start it again. Fortunately,
at least the player remembers where you left off.
In fact, that DVD player has such a good memory that when I
inserted the Agora DVD to play on Thursday, it remember that I’d
borrowed this movie from the library on some previous occasion and watched
about 30 seconds before deciding to save it for another time. It resumed from
30 seconds into the movie, like I’d just been watching it yesterday.
A good DVD player deserves a working remote control, does it not?
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