Not All The Way Dead...Yet

For all the technological advances that we have made as a society, the fact that things still need to run on batteries is amazing to me. You would think we could figure out a way to have a self-contained power sources in more items. I mean, it's 2010, people! (Expect that to be a common cry in this blog for the foreseeable future.) It's a tremendous racket, the battery industry. "Here, these should last for a while." How long is a while? "I dunno. A while." In no other industry can you sell a product and not guarantee at least some period of good service. That's why items come with warranties: "This should work at least this long and if it doesn't make it to then we'll fix it. But after that don't call us if it breaks. Just know, after a certain point, you're living on borrowed time with this machine." Hell, even milk has a date that it will last until.

I bring this up because the batteries in my TV remote are dead. Mostly. Batteries in the TV remote are the worst thing in the world to figure out when to replace, because there is always some juice left. It is always just enough for you to get one more channel change before they die again. But then you watch 10 minutes of a show and by that time the batteries have steeled themselves for yet another change. As a result, you're never sure when they are all the way dead, and the cheapskate in me hates to throw things away before they have completely worn out their usefulness. At least in a clock you can pinpoint the exact second that the batteries died and once they are dead, you know they are all-the-way dead. With the remote batteries it's always a risk as to when they will go completely.

I think the sign that it is finally time is when they don't have enough power for two button presses, just one. When that happens you keeping ending up on the wrong channel. Batteries always seem to kick mid-channel change and the result is, even though you wanted channel 70, the remote instead take you to channel 7 and your stuck with something crappy like figure skating until the batteries can rev themselves back up for one more change. Once this begins happening it's probably for the best that you change the batteries, otherwise who knows what channel and subsequently what show you might end up on. There is nothing worse than trying to get to SportsCenter and ending up on Grey's Anatomy.