And if you do, at least laugh WITH me, not AT me.

* * *

This is what happened to me when I was left home alone, of my own free will, while the family went camping.

On the second day of  bliss  loneliness  solitude  productivity, I decide to tackle the basement.

So I am puttering here and there and eventually end up in the rec room, right? It’s cool and dark but kind of quiet. I’m thinking, I could turn on the tv, watch a cooking show or some drama while I clean out the guinea pig cage or tidy up the crap?

I walk over to the tv.

There are no remotes.

There should be at least two. One to turn on the tv and control volume, and one to change channels.

Years ago I labeled them on the back with a piece of tape so that I don’t accidentally press some wrong button and blow the thing up, or something.

I start looking around. There’s a basket with some electronic gadgetry in it. Glad to see the teen is at least using the basket.

I rummage around it but find mostly just consoles, controllers, cables and some round plastic disk thingy for some toys for the Wii. (I’m guessing it’s for the Wii, but who knows).

Finally a remote turns up. But it doesn’t have a label on the back of it.

It has a word on the front of it, probably the brand it belongs to. But I left my reading glasses upstairs so I can’t see it. Is it for the Xbox? The PS4? The Wii? The tv? WHAT?

Squinting doesn’t help.

How hard can it be to turn on the tv?

I press the red button on the remote I’m holding in my hand.

Nothing happens.

I press another colour button, then some random other buttons, and still, nothing happens.

Finally I push the button on the actual tv.

And, something happens! Success!

Except…

Fortnite is loading. 🙄

Geezeseffen…I managed to turn on the freakin’ fortnite game.

So now I’m frantically looking for the other remotes, the ones I labeled, and finally find them. I push some of the correct buttons and the HDMI menu bar comes up. It’s been explained to me numerous times by my very patient son.

I knew what to do now.

Look. I’m no wimp when it comes to electronics. I’m a pretty practical person. Most of the time I don’t need a lot of help. I taught myself everything I know about the internet, for example, same with social media. And I’m not afraid to learn something new. Mostly.

But understand, I’m home alone and I have a few things I want to cross off the list while they’re gone. I wanted to get stuff done when I was up for it and then save some of my time off to do something nice for myself – go for a massage, treat myself to lunch, that kind of thing. But while working on my to do list, I thought it might be nice to have a little background tv on while dealing with crap, you know? It didn’t really occur to me that the simple procedure of turning the tv on would become a big, complicated, patience-sucking, time-wasting endeavor.

So I’m sitting on the floor, in pretty much the same position as my teenager usually does when he plays fornite, and stare at the screen.

It’s loading fortnite.

I do not want it to load fortnite.

Long story (ha) a little shorter,  I did manage to exit it (I think) eventually, and find a channel on the tv I felt like having on.

The next day, I received a text from the men. They took a trip from the camp site to some nearby town to pick up supplies and checked messages.

I couldn’t resist. I fibbed to my son that I played fortnite.

His response?

Did you win?

SIGH

So much for my fortnite free week. 😛