I’ll tell you something embarrassing - I always press the wrong button to change the channel on the TV remote control. My husband set it up very thoughtfully - the ‘up’ button goes numerically up through the channels - 1 press for each takes me through channel 1, 7, 9, 10, 28 (our 5 free to air channels), and the ‘down’ button goes down through the channels. But I always get it wrong.

He’s done exactly the right thing - up to increase, down to decrease. So why do I get it wrong? I finally figured it out today.

The TV guide that I use is laid out with the channels going down the page, in a table. Channel 1 is in the first row of the table, channel 28 is in the last row. Sounds sensible - numerical order, top to bottom (they only list the channel names, not the numbers, which is why I didn’t include an image, but the name-number match is ingrained).

So what I’m doing is not cycling numerically through the channels, I’m cycling through my memorised visual of the TV guide - if I want to go from channel 1 to 10, I press the ‘down’ button.

Thank goodness I figured that out…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2004 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Random thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.