Electrons

Tonight, Aunt Mae called and asked why she was seeing two of everything. After my initial panic of some potentially serious health condition passed, we determined that she had somehow accidentally activated the Picture In Picture feature of her television.

I asked her to try finding the “PIP” button on her remote, but she couldn’t find it. So, I asked her to try turning off the TV and then turning it back on to see if the PIP would just “go away”. In my fairly-electronics-aware geek brain, the TV might revert to PIP-off on reboot.

“Oh honey, I tried that, but I’m still seeing two of Hillary,” she said. I chuckled, and sympathized.

“Maybe I didn’t leave it off long enough.”

That’s when I was reminded that her understanding of the universe is vastly different from mine. In her mind, the length of time that the TV was off could somehow cause a different outcome when she turned it back on.

It’s not that the electrons might disperse a few microns more, and thus never re-collect to activate the PIP function. In Aunt Mae’s universe, there are no electrons.

To finish the story, it turned out that a few minutes after we hung up, we simultaneously realized that, like most households, Aunt Mae has thirty-some remotes. The phone rang as I was starting to dial her number. We found the PIP button on the correct remote, and she was back to one Hillary. Whew.