Reverse-mute

Have you ever muted the TV during the commercials, only to unleash your wife's blabbering about some subject you couldn't care less about? I mean, commercials are annoying, but your wife puts them to shame. Well, you can't tell your wife to shut up, we all know how that ends, but what you can do is "reverse-mute" her.

The way the reverse-mute works is, just as your wife starts to really unload on the blabber, you un-mute the TV and jack up the volume to a level she can't compete with. In effect, you are silencing her because she can't compete with the loud TV.

As soon as she realizes the TV is too loud to compete with, she'll shut the hell up. At that point you mute the TV again and once again you have silence.

An annoying commercial had just kicked in on the TV, so I muted it. My wife took this as a license to tell me about some stupid movie she watched last night. Blah, blah, blah blah. On and on about the movie. Finally, I had enough, so I resorted to the reverse-mute at full volume. Not being able to compete, she finally shut up and we had peace and harmony again.