pettyrevenge:

My stepdad was a massive control freak with a ridiculous temper.

He controlled every aspect of our lives, but he was especially bad about the TV. He always had to have his chair and always had the remote, no matter what. Not even my mom was allowed to use the chair or the remote when he wanted them. The whole rest of the family could have been 10 minutes from the end of a movie and he’d still change the channel on us. Everyone also had to be completely silent when he was watching something (especially Judge Judy or COPS). If he could hear us make any noise at all, he would go ballistic.

When I was about 12, I got Mission: Impossible for the Gameboy Color. It was a terrible game, but had one really neat feature: you could point any remote at the Gameboy’s infrared port and it would record the signals generated by the remote and then map them to the Gameboy’s buttons. This effectively made the Gameboy a universal remote.

I was never without my Gameboy in those days, and I would often lie on the living room floor and play it on silent while my family watched TV. Once a month or so, I put in Mission: Impossible and just went nuts. Watching him go berserk with no one to aim it at was one of the most satisfying experiences of my childhood. I was never caught.