Hitting The Panic Button

There was panic at our house. In a single minute, our calm evening evaporated.

For most couples, panic is an emotion that follows a major upheaval in life. Events like a financial downturn, loss of a job, or an unexpected diagnosis will most often cause the sudden anxiety and fear associated with panic. While our family has dealt with those situations before, our latest horror occurred just the other night. The hour was late, just after 10:30 pm, when the unthinkable happened.

We lost the back of the remote control for the television sound bar.

When I told this story to a girlfriend, she simply rolled her eyes.

“What? That’s all? You’ve got to be kidding me, you panicked over that?”

“But you have no idea,” I said solemnly. “It was terrible.”

She looked at me and shook her head in pity, so I had to explain.

On a Friday evening, just after the late evening news, my husband attempted to turn off the television set in the hearth room with the remote controls so we could go to bed. Because electronic devices always fail late at night (or when everyone is most tired), the small remote for the sound bar refused to do its only God given job­-turn off the blaring television. Being the crafty engineer that my husband is, he started repeatedly pushing the buttons.

“What the heck,” he said, while then slapping the rectangular plastic onto his thigh.

When his low-tech fix failed to prompt the device to work, my husband took it upon himself to perform a diagnostic check. He loosened the back cover to look at the battery.

“Let me see that,” I said, aware of the irritation in my voice.

“Here,” he said, tossing it gently to me on the couch. “You take a look.”

I opened my hands as the remote went air born. If our life were a sitcom, this moment would have been played in slow motion.

Miraculously, I caught the largest rectangular part of the remote, despite my limited athletic skills. What I couldn’t I grab were the other two pieces that sailed through the air as the entire device came apart. Rising from my seat, I bent down to pick up the shiny silver battery while scanning the rug, but something was wrong.

“Where’s the back of the sound bar?” I asked, hoping against hope that my husband somehow still had the piece in his hand.

“I gave it to you,” he said.

His statement of the obvious made me groan. Somewhere on our very navy rug, surrounded by our very brown coffee table and leather chair, we were now missing a small black piece of plastic that made up the back of the remote control.

And that was the moment of panic, because two very middle-aged people trying to deal with small electronics at bedtime is a recipe for only one thing. Disaster.

To my husband’s credit, he rose from his seat to take charge. He started searching the room, but only found his favorite obscenities to mutter.

Of course, the television continued to blare.

After ten minutes of looking, most of which involved the dog pacing directly over the rug we were trying to search, we called it a night. My husband somehow managed to turn off the television and we went to bed, feeling foolish.

In the morning, armed with mugs of coffee and the dog in the backyard, we used the bright sunlight that streamed through the windows to renew our search for the runaway remote piece. It only took ten minutes of furniture lifting to hit the jackpot. Nestled perfectly on the darkest spot on the rug, the small back of the remote sat innocently waiting to be found. My husband grabbed the tiny plastic disk with delight.

“Got it,” he announced. The pride in his tone reminded me of the way he sounded whenever he used to go fishing and reel in a catch.

“Good,” I said. “Now you can have your television for the weekend, and you don’t have to worry.”

He sat down in his chair and proceeded to punch buttons on the remote until everything worked perfectly.

“I was panicking,” he admitted. “I love you, but a weekend without my movies and sports would just be, well, just kind of boring.”

I nodded in agreement because of his honesty. My husband does need his favorite shows. He doesn’t ask for much and is happy to go without many luxuries, but television is not one of them. Thirty-five years of marriage has made us both realistic.

As a roaring ball game filled the screen in front of us, he smiled, and I retreated to my study. All’s well that ends well.