My Partner in Crime

I think God has truly blessed me with the best brother in the world. (Is it just me or does every little sibling say that?) My brother is caring, loving, and sometimes... hyper-crazy-super-duper-silly. He's willing to teach me something that he doesn't even know how to do. Did I mention he is also my partner in crime? Let me tell you a little story... It was the summer of 2004; my dad had subscribed to cable TV. We don't get regular channels where we live, so when we got cable, it meant CARTOONS! My dad was smarter than that, to keep us from getting addicted to TV, he set a parental lock on all our favorite channels. We could only watch TV when they typed in the code for us. That night my brother sat in his bed thinking of the different ways to crack the parental lock on the TV. Finally, he came up with the idea to sprinkle baking flour on the TV remote and ask our parents to type in the code, leaving the numbers from the code visible on the remote. Step 2 was to map out every combination and try each one until we got it right. On a weekday night when my mom was extremely busy in the kitchen, we decided to put phase 1 into action, I loaded to remote with flour and my brother handed the remote to my mom and begged her to let us watch TV. She looked at the remote and asked," Why is there white stuff on the remote?” My brother replied, “Oh, Jocelyn's just doing so crazy experiment,” which was true in a strange way. She replied," ok,ok,ok." ,typed in the code, and went back to cooking. Phase 1 was complete, we had received the needed numbers and we were ready to begin phase 2. Now after almost 4 years, I have forgotten what the numbers were, but anyway back to the story. Phase 2, when my mom and my brother left for flute lessons, I was left at home. I got the numbers from the remote and mapped out every possible combination. Then I went I tried every combination on the TV. Unfortunately, after every 7 tries the TV would shut down for 30 minutes. After the 20th or 30th try I finally got it. For 3 months my parents didn't know that we knew the code. When they did find out, they didn't know whether to scold us or to laugh. I consider my brother the best thing that I never wished for.