56 buttons

“Don’t forget,” I said to the Spectrum techie; “yer talkin’ to someone born in the previous century.”
Spectrum/Time-Warner is my cable-TV provider, also my Internet.
Spectrum will switch to all digital next Wednesday. I can imagine the torrent of phonecalls from angry Grannies: “Where’s Dr. Phil?”
“What’s on the telly, Dora?”
“A penguin.”
The techie came out to switch me to a DVR (theirs) which would crunch their new digital signal.
Yet another remote, this with 56 buttons. I already have two other remotes: my TV remote has 38 buttons, and my DVD remote has 52.
“You got so many buttons it’s intimidating. When I was a kid we only had three channels. Now yer channel-lineup looks like a thousand; both sides of an 8&1/2 by 17 sheet of paper with print so tiny I gotta use cheaters.
And back then TV was over-the-air. We had an aluminum antenna on the roof that howled in the wind.
It’s much better now. Too bad Howdy-Doody and Camel-News-Caravan weren’t what we have now.
Mention rabbit-ears and Millennials think yer talkin’ about rabbits.
Wait a minute! Yer toggling back-and-forth between this button and that? I gotta be able to drive this sucker!”
And contrary to what I was told, the new remote doesn’t turn on my DVD. TV yes, but not my DVD. Only my old DVD remote does that.
Nothing new: my old DVD remote had a button for turning on my TV, but it didn’t work either.
Techie gone, I’m left alone. “Try it and see what happens,” what got me able to drive this ‘pyooter.
“Got Internet?” the techie asked before he left. “Go to Spectrum.com, and they got tutorials that walk you through drivin’ our remote.”
“Yeah sure,” I said. “I had a stroke. It’s called ‘information overload.’ I can’t compute all that.” (I already told him I was a stroke-survivor.)

• I had a stroke October 26th, 1993 from an undiagnosed heart-defect since repaired. I pretty much recovered. Just tiny detriments; I can pass for never having had a stroke.