The following is a TRUE STORY.

Scene: Large holiday family party in a large house.  There is joy in the air and

the smell of cooking through the house. Music via Sonos is in the air and every

room.

Cousin: Where's the music coming from?
Me: It's my new music system.
Cousin: How does it work?
Me: Well, it's streaming from my hard drive to the speakers in the house which you

control with this controller.
Cousin: So cool.

(Some of the family members seem impressed)
(Suddenly, the music stops.)

Cousin2: What happened to the music?
Me: I don't know.
Cousin3: What's going on with the music?
Me: Hmm....Something.....
(I hear someone mumble something about unreliable technology as I check the
controller.  It seems someone has inadvertently paused the music system.  I restart
it as I go to investigate the source of the problem.  It stops again and I restart
it again. I go from room to room as I fight the usurper. Finally I find the
problem. The kids wanted to show off their school play on a dvd to my
cousin-in-law.  He is a music afficionado and quite intelligent. It appears that he
wanted to turn off the music so they could hear the dvd and when he went to the
source, he recognized the universal symbol for mute and pressed it successfully. He
never imagined that by pressing that button, he could be stopping the music
throughout the rest of the house. I quickly consider my alternatives.  He clearly
needed to be educated on how to turn off a single speaker by using the volume
button and not the mute button. But was this the right time and place?  I decided
to simply mute the speaker for him from the controller and avoid the most awkward
alternative.  Ok. Done.)

(I returned to the kitchen and fielded a couple of questions about what happened to
the music when suddenly, it happened again...)

Fortunately, none of this bothered me. My house, you see, is full of
counter-intuitive systems. The light switches are all mounted upside down so that
down is on and up is off, my refrigerator looks like an oven and my oven looks like
a refrigerator. My toaster is wired backwards so that the darker symbol in fact
produces lighter toast. I do this just for fun, so that I can spend a lot of time
explaining how things work in my house to my guests.  My family knows this about me and love me just the same.   They don't really mind that the hot is on the right
and the cold is on the left or that when someone flushes a toilet, every toilet in
the house flushes!  It adds the drama and excitement of the unexpected to an
otherwise mundane existence.

But that's just me. As for the rest of my family, I don't think they will buy
Sonos but that's just because they have larger houses and bigger parties with more beligerent guests who speak different languages.