If you feel like you’re always losing your TV remote every time you turn around — you’re not alone. In fact, research shows that an estimated 49% of all television remote controls are eaten by couch cushions. And although, thankfully, many of these victims are eventually found, it doesn’t hide the fact that their temporary loss causes quite a bit of frustration for their humans. Research has actually shown that the average TV watcher will spend, over one lifetime, about two weeks looking for lost TV remote controls. That’s right — two weeks.

What hasn’t been studied is the amount of time that the average TV watcher spends fighting with off-brand universal TV remote controls which claim to control every TV-related device that you could possibly need, and then some. But what happens when you buy one of these, instead of one of those brand name replacement remote controls for TVs?

You spend an embarrassingly long time fighting with the packaging just to get it opened, and then you spend even more time going through all of the buttons to figure out which actually work. The volume button works, but only if the DVR is off. The power button works to turn the TV on, but not off. The number buttons have completely given up on even pretending to be useful, and the mysterious blue squiggly button with no label or description whatsoever is already starting to scare you.

And the real problem is that you feel like you don’t have any other options when you lose your TV remote controls so often. A normal adult can only lose so many remote controls before officially becoming inadequate and pathetic, right? Wrong. Everyone loses their remote controls. And anyone who claims to be 100% responsible when it comes to remote controls is also 100% lying to you. It doesn’t matter how many replacement TV remotes you need to buy (even if they’re for the same device) — you should never settle for anything less than the original and the best. See this reference for more: remotes.com