Have you considered the worldwide havoc that would be wreaked when remote controls go bad?

We could end up watching shows we never meant see, such as the educational ones. True, something this unspeakable rarely occurs. But a recent scare left me fretting about the possibilities.

I was lying in bed the other night when I heard a muffled, whirring, grinding, clanking sound I couldn’t identify.

Then it stopped. Then again. Silence. Noise. Silence.

The bed was warm and the pillow soft. On the other side of the blankets was cold, winter air. I decided the commotion was coming from across the street and drifted off to the strange bedtime cadence.
The next day I was chilled to find the door wide open on my attached garage.
As I navigated the glaciers that floed as far back as the workbench, the garage door — apparently of its own accord — rumbled down with a whirring, grinding, clanking kind of sound.

It turns out my garage door opener spent the night opening and closing the door on whatever whim possesses electronics gone insane.

I suppose there is a proper way to fix it. But since I live alone without a female to insist on proper procedures, I used the guy method: I yanked the 9-volt battery from the remote. To open the door now, I touch the battery to the terminals — but only for a moment. Otherwise, the door starts down again. It adds a great deal of excitement to pulling into the garage.

Soon it will take a science degree to get into a garage. Or to run a house.
The only reason microwave ovens aren’t run by remote is we have to be standing there anyway to put our bags of popcorn inside. But as soon as the remote control kitchen robot is invented to ferry the food, we’ll have another set of remotes to lose in the couch cushions.

When those babies go screwy, your robot will be baking so many cookies and cakes in your microwave that you personally will be responsible for upping the average by which Americans are overweight.

Hooking lights into a timer seemed like a great idea. But what’s that remote really doing when you’re away? It’s probably flashing Morse code to your mother-in-law, telling her what you muttered AFTER she hung up the phone.

What if this summer our remote controls for the air conditioner would quit? Could we, as a nation, walk all the way across the room to move the dial? And does anyone remember, without looking it up in an encyclopedia, how to change a TV channel by hand? Is such a thing still possible?

Because my home entertainment system is a hodge-podge of unrelated pieces I bought in sales, I have separate remotes for the DVD player, the TV and the stereo system through which I run my imitation Surround Sound. So it takes me three devices to watch “Futureworld.”

If any one of the remotes cops an attitude, the TV could be flashing like a strobe light while Mozart plays overtop previews that wouldn’t go away. Frightening.
I’d go home and hide under my bed but I can’t. Every time I push the “unlock” button on my car key fob, the doors nestle in more tightly and the horn beeps “Nah, nah, na-nah-naaaaa.”

The remotes have taken over.