We’ve all been there before – you sit down in front of the TV after a long, hard day, a cold, refreshing beverage in one hand and a heaping plate of food in the other. At this point in the day, you really have only one desire – to relax – and you intend to do so with the help of a delicious smelling dinner and a bit of indulgence in your guiltiest of reality TV pleasures. You get all situated, let out that deep sigh to acknowledge that you’ve made it through another day, and then … nothing. You repeatedly jam your thumb on the remote control buttons with increasing frustration, but there will be no Survivor: Antarctica for you this evening…

Or maybe you’re in your car coming home from work, racing home to see your supermodel wife who’s planned a romantic evening of strip poker and pudding wrestling for her man. All day long you’ve fought with jerk clients who want the world of you for only pennies on the dollar, and your boss chewed you out for the third time this week because you still haven’t closed the Henderson account. But tonight is your night – I mean, really, who doesn’t like pudding?! As you pull into the driveway with the excitement of a schoolboy who’s about to see his first nudie mag, you reach for your clicker, but it does nothing of the sort. Begging it to “Just please open!!!” as you gently, but firmly press its one and only button again and again, it fails to do the one thing that it’s designed to do … the thing that it gets it’s name from – opening the garage door.

Bad batteries are an epidemic that has haunted mankind since the dawn of early…well, since about the year 1800, anyways. Even some two hundred years ago when Alessandro Volta had just invented the first batteries (seriously, look it up!), you know that our ancestors still found themselves faced with horrendous frustration when their electric lanterns or walkmans or whatever the heck they used batteries for back then went dark from a lack of juice in that small, or actually probably very large at first, self-contained electrical storage device! I mean, you get home after a long day of walking around wearing a hat with a buckle on it and all you want to do is sit by your brand-new electric lantern and write on your scrolls, but no – the plague of the bad battery strikes again.

Alas, but mere mortals like you and me have few options when it comes to fighting the battles associated with a portable, but also quite limited electrical charge. Sure, we could stockpile massive quantities of batteries in drawers around the house in an attempt to prepare for an unexpected blackout, but with roughly 18,000,000 different sizes for any application, you’d need a separate room filled with nothing but drawers full of batteries to keep up with it all! Some might suggest that we could even get up off our lazy butts and change the stinkin’ channel ourselves, but really, that’s just not a very practical thing to do and those who dared to even suggest it should be ashamed of themselves…

Really, at the end of the day when the lights go down and we turn to our cordless devices to do our bidding for us, all we can do is cross our fingers, pray to the almighty battery gods, and hope beyond all hope that there will be enough juice in that remote to get us through the night.

And if that doesn’t work, try rubbing them in your hands to warm them up – sometimes that works, too…