Button-down woes for digital dummies

Buttons.  That's what our lives are all about in the digital age.  When we mention  our digital  crisis with buttons to friends, they all can go one better (although one did concede that now that the electronics are finally working in his house he still has water leakage problems.   Don't ask.

We've just gone through weeks off finding the right buttons, or combinations thereof, to make things work.

Television?  Five visits by ATT. And  Nancy has  been back to the Apple store several times to find the right buttons to make her iPad  work.  She's ready to put  up a few bucks to find one of those old TVs that you simply plug into the wall and learn to live with the ghosts on the screen. Add to this a new TV because a DVD wouldn't play on the older one.  Or the TV signal that disappeared every 30 minutes or...don't get me started. Every day a new digital adventure.

The latest:. The TV in the bedroom had been working fine until it lost the sound through the sound bar.  Didn't know there was an  off-on button on the sound box.  Even so, with numerous experiments and a new battery,  I still could not get the remote to control the volume.  (That  problem is discussed in Lesson 14 for Dummies in the manual which I don't have).  It's also my loss that I don't understand  the directions that go like this on some of these digital novelties:

Hold down the ACTION Button for 15 seconds while pressing the ACTIVE button and if that doesn't work trying holding your breath for a minute before you do something you will regret

  Oh,  I was told by a technician that there are buttons on the side of the TV that could solve the problem and if that doesn't work get the serial number of the sound bar and feed it to the TV set while holding the tiny remote between your teeth while taking care not to bite  it.

If you played "Button,button, who's got the button" as a child, you'll know what I'm talking about.  It could at least discourage you from paying $99 for a service call. And give you a lot more misery to share  with your friends at lunch.  And there's still a glimmer of hope as depicted in this timely carton from the New Yorker as the wife screams to her distraught husband:

"They fixed the printer"