Comic Relief

Last evening my husband and I were having one of our periodic disagreements. I can't remember what started it but it ended with my comment that there were sure a lot of dandelions in the yard and his observation that I made mountains out of molehills. Both statements were true.

Things were not yet quite comfortable between us when my beloved spouse opened the phone/satellite dish bill. He came striding into the living room where I was seated on the couch, and waved the bill under my nose. "How do you explain THIS?" he demanded.

There were two separate eleven dollar charges for movies. One was entitled "Jugs of Joy." I've forgotten the title of the other--or have blocked it from my memory. Both movies were from the Playboy channel.

I said, "OK, do you REALLY think that while you are out working on the farm that I'm home watching "Jugs of Joy"??

He sheepishly admitted that no, he really didn't think that. We looked at each other and both of us started to giggle. The tension was broken between us and we began to problem solve, trying to think what might have happened. It is to our son's credit that neither of us suspected him--but at any rate he had been away at college on the date the movies were rented. The mystery had to remain unsolved until this morning. I called the DISH TV people and talked with a very nice young man who immediately removed the charges from our bill, no questions asked. He told me how to check the purchase history on our receivers, which I did. On the receiver in the main part of the house I was relieved to note that there was no record of a movie rental, unsavory or otherwise. I turned toward Mom's door in doubt, not seeing how she might have managed to select those movies and purchase them--but when I checked her receiver there they were. I locked the system, established a password, placed ratings blocks on the selections Mom could see (as I'd already done on the main receiver but hadn't thought to do in Mom's room) and made it out of her room before I began to laugh out loud. I'd known that Mom sometimes used the complicated DISH remote and that she has trouble navigating her way around the 100 channels in our basic package. But purchasing a movie requires several steps and I hadn't thought she would be able to accidentally complete the transaction.

Poor Mom. Maybe she thought "Jugs of Joy" was a Christian station. I just hope and pray she didn't actually begin to watch the movie. The shock wouldn't have been good for her.