I swear there must be thousands of these things thrown against walls every day. Mom’s has a mute button which seems to have gotten off-center from its spring inside the case. If you press it you run the risk of not getting your sound back without a fair degree of fussing and cussing.
I don’t advocate for the old days of walking to the TV and rotating channel knobs or volume buttons, but boy oh boy, some modern conveniences have their own little idiosyncrasies.
I think there needs to be a federal mandate requiring mute buttons on all TVs. I can’t tell you how many times I have been far away from the remote – say, washing dishes, while the remote was on the kitchen table – at the moment some incredibly inane commercial (“The Hoppah?” “The Hoppah!” “THE HOPPAH!” “THE HOPPPPPAAAHHHHH!!!” – p.s.: Screw you, Dish Network) came on, and I could not make it back to the remote in time to silence it. At these times I’d much rather be able to press a button on the TV to silence it.
Hmmm…I suppose I COULD just yank the cable from the cable box in these situations.