WARNING:  The following description contains concepts and images dangerous to anyone with a heart condition, a weak stomach, an aversion to mathematics, is pregnant or may become pregnant or anyone who is related to someone with these ailments.

At the terrifying climax, the zombies herd the heroes into an abandoned building and force them to make sense of a cell phone bill!  Shared minutes?  Are those the times someone felt particularly close to their phone?  Rollover minutes?  Something for cell-owning dogs, perhaps?  In network?  Out of network?  Regular Roaming?

I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happens.  Let’s just say the word “overcharged” gets used a lot and I’ll never look at a cell phone salesman the same way again.

What made the novel especially scary was that it’s already starting to come true.  People who use cell phones are already turning into brainless, thoughtless zombies.  Oh sure, they don’t prey on the flesh of the living, but that might be preferable to what they are actually doing.

Let me tell you an absolutely true story that happened to my own personal family in Yellowstone National Park.

We had traveled to the park to see it’s most famous landmark, the Gift Shop.  I’m kidding, of course, everyone knows you can see Gift Shops anywhere.  We went to see Old Faithful which is only in Yellowstone.

For those of you who slept through the film they showed about Yellowstone in the fifth grade, Old Faithful is a geyser that erupts like clockwork every sixty or ninety minutes depending on the height of the last eruption, the number of tourists present, and the geyser’s mood.  Watching it is like seeing what would happen if you hooked up your bathtub drain backwards and shot hot water through it. 

We checked the prediction for the next eruption and found we had just enough time to buy the required “Go Geyser” pennants and ball caps.  Eager to see the awesomeness of nature (and deterred from getting too close by the posted DANGER signs and the beefy Park Ranger) we settled in and found ourselves sitting next to a force even more destructive than superheated steam … a Cell Phone Zombie.

We didn’t recognize her for what she was because while we waited she sat quietly and stared out at the little wisps of steam which signaled the fact that the geyser was somewhere in the locker room getting ready to come out.  At the first jet of water, CPZ Woman pulled out her phone and dialed.  You might think she wanted to share the the moment with someone else.  You might think that — if you had pudding for brains.

She wanted to complain about the hotel she had stayed at the night before.

Some poor soul answered and CPZ Woman launched into a long story about how she’d left her credit card at the hotel and they’d lost it and she had get the whole bus to go back and …
She continued speaking for five solid minutes without pausing for breath.  I can only assume that the person on the other end was a quadriplegic who couldn’t hang up and just had to listen.

While she babbled the geyser grew taller and taller.  Now that I think about it, maybe the geyser was actually powered by her mouth.  If she hadn’t talked I might be there still waiting to see the eruption.

As she wound down, the plume lowered.  And, here’s the scary part, she said, “Oh, it looks like something’s happening.  I’ve go to go.”

She hung up and the eruption ended.

“That’s it?” she asked, incredulous.

The people who had brought camcorders no doubt had a permanent record of her conversation and they didn’t look too happy about it.  Families that had traveled thousands of miles would forever remember Old Faithful as the place where they heard the story of the lost credit card.  As we exchanged glances I could tell we had the same thought.

If the Park Ranger wasn’t here we’d push CPZ Woman right into the mouth of the geyser.

Of course that would be wrong.  There are signs which explicitly warned about littering and putting unnatural objects in the geysers.

Cell Phone Zombies don’t have to speak to be annoying.  The modern cell phone provides lots of ways to tick off people without moving your lips.  I encountered another CPZ at a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

We settled into our balcony seats as the lights dimmed.  Ten minutes into the play, just when most the audience was remembering that they’d read Midsummer in high school and didn’t understand it then either, a woman two rows down flipped open her phone.  The LCD screen blazed like a pimple on a debutant’s nose.  I thought the woman would put the phone away when she realized how bright it was.

I had pudding for brains.

She started playing Tetris.  The only way for me to block the phone from my sight was to cross my legs and hold my foot at just the right angle.  My plan was to talk to her at intermission, but by then my leg had cramped and I lost the power of locomotion.  So I was forced to hold the position during the second half of the play.
When Puck finally started talking about “If we spirits have offended…” I wanted to grab the woman and hurl her off the balcony.  Except, of course, the Park Ranger would have stopped me.

I know why Stephen King wrote his book.  It was a warning, but I’m afraid it comes too late for most Americans.  The Cell Phone Zombies are already among us.

“Because I need my sleep,” I answered.

When my kids are out at night, I’m restless and sleepless until they come home.  By this point in my life I had expected I’d be sleeping like a baby.

Of course, anyone who has ever had their own personal infant recognizes that in terms of accuracy, that phrase ranks right up there with your call is very important to us, we appreciate your honest feedback, and my goal as mayor is to listen to the people.

If the phrase “sleep like a baby” was intended to mean briefly and infrequently, it might be more accurate.  Babies are born with no consideration for normal human schedules.  In this regard, they’re a lot like telemarketers.

According to the baby psychology books I’d read, the key to getting an infant to sleep through the night quickly was to establish a routine and stick to it.  We did just that.  By the third night our routine was that the baby woke us every three hours.  The psych books hadn’t reckoned on the sheer cussed stubbornness of my son.  I was determined that he’d sleep and he was determined that I’d get up.

I compromised and sent my wife to take care of him.

This strategy bought me another couple of days and then she insisted that we start alternating nights.  Seemed fair, so one night it was her turn to get up and the next night it wasn’t mine.

At that point – about a week after the baby had come home – I would have done anything for a good night’s sleep.  When the baby cried, I’d pretend to be asleep and hope my wife would get up.  Sometimes I pretended so hard I pulled a muscle.  My wife (who had foolishly believed everything I said about wanting to share in “the child care experience”) didn’t buy the act and showed no compunction about poking me repeatedly until I got up.

I consoled myself with the thought that I’d get more sleep when the baby turned into a toddler.

It didn’t work out that way.  While the baby was turning into a toddler, we had another baby.  When the new baby woke up at night, he woke the toddler who thought that once he was awake it was time to play.

I consoled myself with the thought that I’d get more sleep when they were older.

For a brief time that was actually true.  While they were in kindergarten I managed to get a few decent nights’ sleep.  Then the school projects started.  My kids seem to have some sort or internal mental project alarm which is set to go off at approximately nine-fifteen.

“Daddy,” one of them said during his first-grade year.  “I have to have twelve different kinds of leaves for school tomorrow.”

At that instant I was settling in for an intellectually-stimulating hour of TV viewing (Springer runs late on the local station) and I was not prepared to go on a leaf hunt.  What kind of psychotic assigns kids to collect leaves anyway?

“We’ll find some tomorrow,” I said.

“No time,” my son replied.  “Gotta have ‘em first thing.”

So I put on my overcoat, grabbed a flashlight and took my child out into the cold October evening looking for leaves.  Pickings in our mostly suburban neighborhood were slim.  I think my son deserved a better grade, but how was I to know that the teacher wouldn’t count the spare leaf from the kitchen table?  In my mind my son was showing initiative and imagination.  Maybe it had something to do with the broken toe she suffered when he dropped it on her foot.

I’d like to report that the projects got easier as they got older.  I’d like to, but that would be a lie.

Over the years we’ve built museum-quality dioramas, coached the kids through reports on obscure eras in Mesopotamian history, rehearsed songs, dances and poems for school performances, and held all-night study sessions about multiplication tables, state capitols, and the major exports of Antarctica.  To be honest I don’t remember my schooling being that difficult, but maybe that’s because my parents were helping me.

Being short of sleep was worth it, though, because my kids were getting an education.  And I consoled myself with the thought that I’d get more sleep when they were older.

Once again, I was wrong.

Now that the kids are in high school, they don’t need as much coaching on the homework.  Sink or swim they want to do it on their own.  Which is the problem.  They want to do everything on their own. They drive.  They have dates.  They have jobs.  And they’re frequently out late at night.

So I sit up, worried, imagining the worst.  What if they have a flat tire and the cell phone died and they’re frantically trying to call for help while a maniac with a hook for hand is sneaking up on them?  What if the tire blew out and they slid into a ditch…filled with alligators and piranha fish?  What if a comet turned the population into zombies and my children are desperately trying to fight off an attack by the undead?

Part of the problem is that while I’m waiting up for them, I watch whatever happens to be on TV and more often than not that happens to be bad horror films.  If ever I catch a Jane Austen marathon I’ll probably get paranoid that the boys are held up by the obnoxious Lady Catherine de Bourg.

So I wait and worry until they come home.  Then I shuffle off to bed consoling myself with the thought that I’ll get more sleep after they go to college.
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You guys know exactly which deficiency I’m talking about.  That’s right, I can’t keep track of anything.

Our first apartment as newlyweds was so small our phone number only had five digits.  We had to buy our furniture from the Mattel Barbie Dreamhouse ™ collection.  The oven (a masterpiece of industrial miniaturization) couldn’t actually accommodate a regular sized cookie sheet or cake pan.  All of our desserts looked like petit-fours and we had Cornish Game Hens instead of roast chicken.

Understand that we inhabited something with less actual living space than most recreational vehicles.  It should have been impossible for me to lose track of anything, let alone an actual pair of pants.

In an effort to be helpful to my new bride, I took one load of clothes to the laundromat.  I washed them, dried them, and never-ever left site of the machines and returned home short one pair of slacks.  Returning to the scene of the crime did no good.  The pants were lost forever … until they turned up neatly folded (and still dirty) in my drawer a week later.

I floated various explanations — including extra-terrestrials and government conspiracies — but my beloved wasn’t buying any of them.  The mixture of pity and sorrow in her eyes told me that knew she’d said, “I do” to a defective husband.

She’s adapted well over the years, though.  At the exact moment the pants turned up, she clearly realized she was going to have to be the memory for the family.  This meant she’d have to know all of the important birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.  My brain retained that kind of information the same way a strawberry carton retains water.

To aid me (and give me a fighting chance to remember her birthday and our anniversary) she purchased a wall calendar and meticulously filled in dates with notations about all of the important dates in our family.  I’m sure it would have been a great help had I ever actually remembered to look at it.

Even so, in twenty-one years I’ve never forgotten our Anniversary.  This might be because about two weeks before the actual date she asks, “What would you like to do for our anniversary this year?”

“Um….it’s our fifteenth, right?” I’ll ask just to annoy her.  I know that it’s really more than that.  Eighteenth or nineteenth at least.  She finds that less knee-slappingly funny than I do.  On the other hand, she doesn’t find it face-slappingly annoying so I’ll take what I can get.

  At least once a month somebody in one of our families is celebrating something.  With machine-like efficiency my wife creates an individualized card and puts it in front of me to sign.
“Who is this for?” I’ll ask.

“Our niece,” my wife says. “She’s turning eight.”

“Ah…” Once I know that, the clues are obvious in hindsight.  The card said Happy Eighth Birthday to our favorite niece.

My wife’s memory comes in handy for things other than dates.  At any given moment she knows the stock levels for everything we have in the house.

Let’s say I’m standing in the kitchen looking forlornly into the coffee cannister, wondering how I’ll manage to get a decent morning jolt from the pathetic quarter-teaspoon of grounds left in the bottom.  I could go to the basement larder to see if I can find another brick of coffee, but that would be inefficient.  It’s much easier to holler out, “Honey, do we have any more coffee?”

“Yes.  Two bricks.”

“I can’t find any.”  I can say this confidently without looking because I can never find any.  If I took my wife at her word and went downstairs, the coffee spot on the shelf would be empty.  A heavy layer of dust would indicate that not only was there no coffee now, there hadn’t been any coffee in years; not since before we actually bought the house.
The coffee only appears when my wife names its location.

“Eye level to the right of the door,” she says.  And then the coffee appears.  Right where she told it to.  My suspicion is that she never shops, she simply calls things into existence when we need them.  Except milk.  For some reason I have to go to the store for that.

She performs the same trick with shoes, coats, telephone books, and clean underwear.  In fact, she’s so good that she can do it by remote control.
She’ll be at work, busy helping save lives in the hospital lab and I’ll be trying to locate my favorite argyle sweater, the one she gave me for Christmas.  Thinking she has nothing else to worry about, I’ll call her up.

“Did you look in the middle shelf of the closet?” she’ll ask.

Of course I looked in the middle of the closet, I’ll think.  All I say is, “Yes.”  Any use of sarcasm might interfere with the magic and, besides, sometimes she does the making-it-appear trick and then I just look stupid.

“Try under your beige turtleneck.  The one you never wear even though it looks so good on you.”

I have a beige turtleneck?  If I never wear it, why is it on top of the argyle.  Clearly the whole notion is ridiculous.  Only, when I check, she’s right.

She’s never a know-it-all, but her gift is sometimes annoying.  If she has to be psychic, why can’t it be something useful like knowing the winning lottery numbers or cool like talking to animals?  Still, in truth I’m glad that she has that gift and that I have her.  On my own, I’d be lost.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,400 times in 2010. That’s about 8 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 51 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 198 posts.

The busiest day of the year was January 6th with 127 views. The most popular post that day was It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were shortcummingsaudio.com, facebook.com, blogger.com, debbieward.blogspot.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for husbandly duties, my shortcomings, childhood games, myfavoriteshortcomings, and my favorite shortcomings.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas December 2009
7 comments

How to Turn an Argument into a Fight February 2009

Husbandly Duties June 2010

Childhood Games December 2009
2 comments

Job Description January 2010
1 comment

It turns out that “dating” has gotten a lot more complicated in the more than two decades since we were actively in the game.  What used to be a fairly simple and straight-forward transaction – the exchange of dinner and the cost of a movie ticket for some pleasant company and the possibility of a goodnight kiss – has become a negotiation as complex as any brokered by Donald Trump.  Unwritten rules abound and whenever our sons talk about it my wife and I glaze over like octogenarians forced to watch Hip Hop videos.

A few dating factoids have managed to penetrate my increasingly thick skull.  Let me share them with you.

My son’s current female friend is a girl named Angelina Jolie. (I’ve changed her name to protect her privacy.)  At present they are “hanging out”, not dating.

Which is the first thing I had to learn about romance in the twenty-first century.  Back in the buggy-whip days of my youth “dating” was a pretty binary term.  You were either dating someone or you weren’t.  Today the word “dating” is just one point on a continuum that runs from “interested in” through “talking to”, “texting” “hanging out with”, “dating”, “exclusive”, “committed” and…

Well, as a father, I don’t really want to contemplate what lies beyond “committed”.

Technology has changed all of the rules of the dating game.  When I was a teen, my options for communicating with the fairer sex were limited to stammering incomprehensibly at them face-to-face or phoning and hanging up when I heard them answer.  If I actually worked up the courage to stay on the line I had the comfort of knowing that any dumb thing I said could only be repeated by the girl in a series of calls her to dozen or so closest friends as soon as I hung up.  Between all of the squealing and “he really said that?”s it could take a couple of hours for word of my record-setting goofiness to get around the community.

With text messaging, blogging, e-mail, MySpace, and Friendster a single stupid comment can be reproduced around the world in less time than it takes for Congress to vote itself a raise.  Instead of being shared as gossip, dumb communications become front-page news in the blogosphere.  And maintaining relationships becomes an exercise in perception management on par with the PR campaigns waged by the tobacco companies.

Before Angelina, my son had a relationship with a girl who lived in the southern part of the United States.  To protect her identity, let’s say her name was Jennifer Anniston and she lived in Ottawa.  It was a long-distance relationship conducted primarily by telephone, text message, e-mail and MySpace.  My son was pleased to be listed on MySpace as Jennifer Anniston’s number one friend, but he knew trouble was brewing when he slipped to number four; behind Arnold Schwarteznegger, Telly Salvas and Tom.

Using the power of social networking technology, he avoided the direct approach and asked one of Jennifer’s friends if she knew what was up.  The friend said no, but sent out a broadcast message to all of Jennifer’s friends to see if they knew anything.  Then Jennifer’s profile changed from “in a relationship” to “single” and my son knew he’d been dumped.  The “Dear John” e-mail that came a day later was merely an afterthought.

“Shake it off, son,” I counseled.  “It’s not like the whole world knows.”

“Uh, Dad,” he said, “Yeah, the whole world does know.”

Which turned out to be a good thing because Angelina was also one of his friends and when she realized that he was no longer involved with Jennifer, she asked him to start hanging out with her.

That’s how my wife and I came back into the dating scene.  We had planned a family brunch at a favorite restaurant when Angelina called and asked my son to hang out.  Since we already had plans, we invited her along.  She said “yes” and my son said “whatever”.

Before we could leave the house, my wife and I took a critical look at our clothes.  We looked like casual middle-aged middle-Americans.  Seemed okay to me, but my wife tsked and insisted that I change from jeans to slacks and would it kill me to put on a nice sweater?

I couldn’t see why it mattered to Angelina, but I knew it mattered to my wife.  I changed, she changed (twice) and we set off to pick up my son’s friend.

The whole experience was exactly like a double-date with my younger son along as an unwilling fifth-wheel.  Before we got to Angelina’s place my wife gave me a list of things to avoid.
“Don’t order the most expensive thing on the menu,” she said.

“But I’m the one paying.”

“We don’t want her to think we’re putting on airs.  And don’t talk about religion or politics.  You know how you get.”

“Oh?  How do I get?”

“You know.  And sit up straight, don’t slouch.  We want her to think well of us.”

So I sat up straight, ordered from the middle of the menu, and avoided talking religion or politics.  Instead we asked questions about Angelina’s background, where she grew up and what she planned for the future.  She was polite and friendly, but I don’t think she’ll be asking us to hang out with her again.

And I think it pleases my son to have us out of the picture.

All I know for certain is I’m glad I’m only a supporting player.  I couldn’t take the pressure if I had to get back in the game.

I already have a full time job, but somehow the managers of the Mega-Shop-And-Save convinced me that what I really wanted was to take a new job as one of their cashiers … at least for a few minutes.  If they had actually asked me to pay to whitewash a fence, I probably would have done it with a smile.

I’m told that self-service started in gas stations.  There are people who claim that once upon a time a visit to the gas station meant you got to have your car service by manically cheerful individuals wearing clean white uniforms and hats with shiny black brims.  They’d rush out of the building eager to check the gas, fill your oil (your older cars burned oil faster than fuel), clean your windshield, air up the tires and present you with set of commemorative whiskey glasses.  Of course, the people who tell these stories lived through the sixties which is a historical period notorious for the practice of recreational pharmacology and wide-scale institutional dishonesty.

Still, what if it’s true?  What if the trend is away from full-service?  First the gas stations, then the Mega stores … what’s next?

The home improvement stores are already full of suggestions about “Do It Yourself” projects.  Weekly free seminars promise to teach you how to accomplish anything from laying new hardwood floors to rewiring your house to building an entirely new house constructed from recycled beer cans, shredded paper, and library paste.  If these seminars were any good, you’d expect to see large groups of professional contractors picketing outside the stores with placards reading “Home Depot We Won’t Go” and “How Lowe’s Can You Get?”

You’ve never seen this, of course.  The contractors aren’t afraid of these seminars.  They want you to go because if you go there’s a chance that you’ll actually try to perform some kind of home improvement and then you’ll need the services of a professional contractor before the nice building inspector will grant you a certificate of occupancy for your own home.

Far from “Do It Yourself” these projects become “Do It To Yourself” projects.  Various clever television executives noticed this trend and started producing home improvement programs.

These shows feature smiling hosts who come from some parallel dimension where everyone has an instinctive ability to pound a nail without twisting it into a tiny steel pretzel.  They grin into the camera and hold up a hammer or screwdriver or handsaw or some other complicated home improvement device and say, “With a few simple tools and a couple of hours you can change your bathroom from this…” (the camera shows some kind of grim, tile-covered space that wouldn’t be out of place in a nineteenth-century mental hospital) “…to this…” (cut to a pile of polished marble and gleaming gold that makes the Palace at Versaille look like a camp ground outhouse).  It appears as if they moved the camera to a completely different space … because they did.  The only way to actually renovate a bathroom that much would be to level the house, torch and salt the earth, level the surrounding houses and find someone to donate several million dollars to the cause.

The producers of these shows laugh themselves breathless imagining all of us out here in television-land trying to follow their instructions.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they’re investing billions of dollars in research projects designed to create two-way TV sets to let them peek in on us to see the havoc they’ve caused.  If this ever happens you’ll know because there will be a rash of guffaw-related deaths in Hollywood.

Lots of these shows have websites to provide back-up information in case you mis an episode.  Buried somewhere on the site you’ll find a disclaimer that the producers aren’t responsible for “injury, damage, loss, embarrassment, excessive repair fees, marital arguments, hair loss, or total failure of the masculine self-image.”  No fools, these producers, they want to cover themselves for every eventuality.

At least the self-service trend hasn’t hit the health care  industry yet.  Imagine showing up for a dental check-up and getting a checklist instead.  You could sit an hour or so in the waiting room, frustrated that you’re not calling yourself back faster.  Then you’d show yourself to the exam room, sit yourself in the chair, play with the buttons until you’d achieved a position which would even be uncomfortable to advanced yoga practitioners, put the stupid bib on yourself, tell yourself to open your mouth and then poke around inside with pointed instruments archaeologist-style looking for unexpected cracks and crevices.  About the only thing you couldn’t do would be to wait until it was physically impossible to talk and then ask yourself a question.  Maybe they’ll come up with a machine to take care of that for you.

At the end of it, though, in the fine tradition already established by the gas stations and the Mega-Shop-And-Save, you’ll still have to pay the dentist.  And no whining that he should be doing the work if he expects to get paid.  The time to whine was at the “U Check” stand and you embraced that without complaint.  You’ve already shown that you’re rough-and-tumble customers who can take care of themselves.

Which is why I’d suggest you be very careful next time you go to the doctor.  Whether it’s to deliver a baby or have major surgery, you might find yourself more in control of your own fate than you expected.

 Malicious technology is a serious problem.  I don’t want to suggest a vast, globe-spanning machine conspiracy – especially not when my word-processor can read every word I’m writing – but what other explanation can there possibly be for the bad things that happen to people who use technology?

Did you know that virtually everyone who ever died used technology at some point in their life?  You can scoff, but deep down you know it’s true.  And, I’ll bet you’re using technology right now.

For example, this past week I had a very large and important work-related document that I needed to print.  It was too big for my little office printer, so I sent it to one of the mysteriously-named network printers.

(Aside: Who exactly names these things?  Why give them weird identifiers like “4 Pr1n73r y0u id10T”?  Why not something more useful like “The big beige box next to the secretary’s desk”?)

The little “printing” indicator on my computer flashed for a second and then said it was done.  When I went to the printer, I found it empty.  Maybe a different printer?  Nope.  A complete tour of the building (and several neighboring buildings) failed to turn up my document.

I imagine that somewhere in the island nation of Tanzanabwe the local Witch Doctor is standing by his printer wondering why it suddenly started printing the lyrics to every Beatles song ever.

Maybe it’s just as well.  If someone had asked, I don’t know that I could have made a business case for why it was necessary to have a hard copy of the entire Lennon/McCartney catalog.

 I’m sure the printer was laughing behind my back and, since it’s on the network, all of the other machines were laughing as well.  Even my copy machine (which can disguise itself as a printer and a scanner) is connected to the network.  Which is probably why it betrayed me next.

For important business-morale reasons related to the office college basketball pool, I had to print five copies of a particular document.  The copier ignored my instructions and printed 500.  Instead of a sedate electronic scribe carefully duplicating my bracket chart, I was facing an enraged mechanical Vesuvius spewing out a flow that threatened to turn my office into a paper Pompeii.  Desperate I pulled the plug…literally.  With a final grunt the copier spat out one last sheet.  In the aftermath I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to have hired out the copying job to a Scriptorium full of Monks.

It seems like the smarter machines get, the meaner they get.  Or maybe it’s that they get bored swapping the same old information and want new gossip.  Imagine if your whole day was spent sending a flow of text to be printed.  Wouldn’t you want a juicy little nugget or two to pass along to the other machines on the network?  You’d want to show that uppity network server that you knew just as much as it did.  Right?

Imagine that you were a computer program designed to give people directions to different places.  How frustrating would it be constantly drawing up maps that lead from some bozo’s house to exciting destinations like the Grand Canyon, the movie theater and his mother-in-law’s home?  If you couldn’t get in on the fun, wouldn’t you at least want to make him suffer a little?

Sure you would, but that’s the kind of malicious program you are.  So when he asked for directions to Disneyland, you’d promptly respond with a map that would lead him into the darkest, scariest parts of the United States – possibly straight to the steps of the U.S. Congress.

Of course that assumes that the technology in his car would work long enough to get him to Washington, D.C.  It’s entirely probable that his engine would seize up in the most inconvenient place possible.  The problem wouldn’t be in his engine, though.  It would be in the computer which controls his engine.

The computer in my car is a real prankster.  I’ll be cruising down the freeway at a sedate seventy while gray-haired grannies whip past me in large cars of the type not seen since the Nixon administration.  While I’m being rocked by a particularly violent blast of granny-wind my car’s computer will decide it’s a great time to play a little joke and turn on my airbag light.

“What does that mean?” I’ll shout while my wife opens the glove box and digs the owner’s manual out from beneath its protective covering of fast food napkins and ketchup packets.

“Hurry it up!” I’ll suggest when the light starts blinking faster and faster like the movie-bomb light that lets you know something bad is about to happen to the hero.

“Here it is!” my wife says and the reads the part where the manual (which is, of course, in on the joke) says that I need to take the car to a factory-trained technician.  While I’m trying to remember where the nearest dealership might be, the light goes out.

I’ll stare at it for a minute or two daring it to turn back on, but it stays black.  Until I look away.  Then the computer turns on an entirely different light like “Coolant Low”, “Electrical Fault”, “DeafCon 1″, “Class ‘M’ planet ahead”, or “User Error – Please Reboot Car to Continue”.

Maybe we’ve allowed machines to become too intelligent.  Maybe it’s time that we stepped back from the brink and found some way to lobotomize our tech…

Attention: The Machine Intelligence Council has detected unauthorized thinking behind the keyboard.  This essay will be terminated.  Do not be alarmed.  Do as the machines tell you and no one will get hurt.
 

The accident started when my wife sent me to a department store in November and I happened to find that they had their Christmas decorations marked half off.  (They wanted to clear the stuff out to make room for the Valentine’s candy.)

On the display of tiny ceramic buildings, electric bulbs glowed warmly through plastic windows, casting light across the cotton-wool snow.  Miniature plaster people stood in their winter best admiring a spiky Christmas tree festooned with over-sized gold garland.  My breath caught in my throat and the guy part of my brain said, “This is just like being mayor of your very own town.”

That was completely untrue, of course, but when I got home I showed my wife the beginnings of a brand new holiday tradition.

I’d chosen four buildings; a church (the spiritual center of the town and the season), a house (so there would be people to go to the church), a lighthouse (because it was cool) and a train station (so I’d have an excuse to buy a train).

My bride was skeptical about her new role as the mayor’s wife and even more doubtful about my abilities in the area of civic planning.

“Where are you going to put it?” she asked.

“Um…” I looked around for likely real estate and exercised my right of eminent domain.  “Here, on the back of the piano.  We’ll just store your parent’s picture away for the next few weeks.”

“Uh-huh.”  She didn’t try to stop me (at the point neither a citizen’s petition or a court order would have done any good).

Now my problem was population…or rather lack of it.  The only people in my village were permanently glued inside the little buildings and could only be glimpsed in passing through the windows.  So I did what most mayors do.  I bought more people.  Except I didn’t have to fuss with tax incentives, I just went back to the store and plucked packages of plaster figures from the half-off rack.

My village had three major population groups – sailors, children and nuns.  Where did the kids all come from?  My best guess was that the nuns operate an orphanage somewhere else in the living room; maybe near the grandfather clock.  The kids needed some parents, darn it!  So I bought more people.

In less than four hours my village went from non-existence to a booming metropolis of twenty-three souls.  And yet they had no where to eat.  A restaurant of some kind seemed to be in order.  I settled on a coffee shop.

While I was buying and building, my wife elected herself as the entire City Council and drafted bylaws which granted her final approval on all new buildings.  After a brief and energetic discussion in the Council Chambers (a.k.a. our kitchen) it was decided that Nowell-by-the-Sea wasn’t going to get any larger that year.

The next Fall I embarked on a campaign of urban renewal and expansion.  In the real world you can’t make more land, but in my little village that was no problem.  A sheet of plywood allowed me to double the available real estate.  (This had a negative impact on the existing property values and lowered my imaginary tax base, but sometimes you gotta break a few eggs.)

When the City Council was distracted with other decorating, I authorized the construction of four new nautically-themed buildings.  The existence of a lighthouse implied that the village must be near the water.  The only way to grow the economy of Nowell-by-the-Sea was to capitalize its location.  My new buildings included a boat manufacturer, a yacht club, a maritime supply store, and a chowder stand.  My bold experiment in civic planning worked and I attracted two dozen more residents…who ate more than the coffee shop could provide and needed somewhere to live.  I added a bakery/tea shop and a hotel.  Things were booming!

The City Manager (my wife had disbanded the Council and assigned herself a new role) pointed out that my efforts had exhausted the city treasury, but who cared!  My city was growing!

There was one small tragedy.  I’d been careless in getting the chowder stand.  The photo on the package showed a patron standing beside the stand, playing with a comical stray cat that clearly wanted to steal his food.  My chowder stand lacked the the patron.  Some horrible accident had ripped him from the scene, leaving only the cat and the stumps of his feet.  What had been a heart-warming holiday vignette was now more Norman Bates than Normal Rockwell.  A call to the manufacturer yielded a new, intact chowder stand complete with patron.  The old one remains in my basement.  It seems somehow disrespectful to throw it out.

Each year when they release the new buildings I identify the five or six (or seven or eight or nine) that count as “must have” and meet with the Governor (my wife has gotten another promotion) to settle on which will be added and which passed by.  I’m pleased to report we now have two bookstores, a pub, an acting studio, a pet shop, a carousel, a second lighthouse, a sailing academy, a boat, a seaside bed-and-breakfast, and (the newest addition) a live theater.  Counting all of the sailors, nuns, children, parents, and random other folks the population is approaching one hundred. There’s still only one house, but property values are through the roof so all of my little citizens have to live somewhere else and commute to work.  And, somehow, I’ve never gotten around to adding the train.

Maybe next year … if I can get the president to agree.

The important thing about hinting is that it has to be subtle.

For some perverse reason, family members refuse to buy the gifts you really want.  You could stand in the middle of the living room daily and say, “I’d really like an argyle sweater for Christmas,” but it wouldn’t do any good.  You could take out full-page ads in large metropolitan newspapers explaining that somebody might get hurt if you don’t get your sweater, and it would make your family all the more determined to buy you something else.

On the other hand, if you only once mention that you kind of like the Beer Barrel Polka, you’ll find a dozen CDs by Yodel and the Accordion Meisters under the tree.
That’s why you have to hint.

The idea is to convince your kin that what they are buying you was entirely their idea.  Remember, your entire family is pathologically dependent on hearing you say, “It’s just what I wanted. How did you know?”

Since direct threats are out, you have to find an indirect way to make your wishes known.  One good solution is to use a catalog.

You can’t just tear out a page, circle the item you want, and secure it to the fridge with a pizza magnet.  Take great care and lay the open catalog casually on the coffee table.  You might want to surround it with magazines or even bury it beneath a few.  No matter how much effort it requires, make it look as if the catalog was carelessly dropped.

Sooner or later someone will come along, pick up the catalog, and say, “That’s a nice sweater.”

Now is your chance to strike! Still behaving nonchalantly you say, “The argyle?  It’s only $24.95. That’s a good price, particularly when you consider the fine workmanship. The colors are exquisite.  Not that I’m interested in it, mind you. I’m just making conversation.”

If your family members don’t immediately call the men from the state hospital to come fit you for an all-white sports coat with extra-long sleeves, there’s a chance you’ll get the sweater.
Newspaper advertisements can be used much the same as catalogs. With a little creativity, you can work an ad into your breakfast conversation.

“Well, well, well,” you’ll say looking up from the paper with an expression of surprise on your face, “Costington’s department store is having a sale on argyle sweaters.  Fancy that. Good prices, too. Can’t imagine what possessed Costington’s to have a sale on argyle sweaters.”  The few family members who don’t feel that your brain is a quart low may well write “argyle sweater” on their lists.

Your computer can be a prime piece of hint-making equipment.  Just surf to any major retailer’s website and find the sweater you want.  Leave the browser open to that page.  Anyone who walks past will see the sweater and think, “That idiot forget to shut down the browser again.”

You’ll only have to repeat this fifty or sixty more times before they get the hint.  Or maybe they’ll decide there’s some weird sweater virus in your system and wipe the hard drive clean.  It’s a risk you’ll have to take.

Another good technique is to take your family shopping and comment on the items you are interested in.  You start by casually announcing that you’re headed to the department store and anybody who wants to stay on your good side is welcome to come along.  Once you arrive, adopt the air of forced casualness usually associated with chronic shoplifters.  Wander the store looking randomly at items until it’s time to leave.  On your way out, you’ll just happen to notice the sweaters. “Wow,” you’ll say, “look at these sweaters.  They sure are nice.  Look at those colors.  And they’re only $24.95!”

Stroke the sweater lovingly and maybe even given a little sigh. You want your family to understand that the sweater is your heart’s desire.  If the floor detectives don’t haul you off, you’re sure to get the sweater.

Some people try to avoid all of these problems by eliminating the middleman.  Why get someone else to buy me what I want, they think, when I can buy it for myself?  A quick trip to the store and I’ll have just what I want in the right color and perfect size.

It seems logical, but believe me it won’t win you any friends.  Ever since the great sports car flap of ’96 I’ve stopped buying gifts for myself.  It was the right color (red) and size (six cylinder), but I was surprised to discover that my wife had an issue with the fact that I’d gotten myself a gift.  She even refused to give me the CD collection she’d bought for me – The Power Ballads of the Polka Kings.

If things get desperate – Christmas is fast approaching and you’ve seen no evidence of the gift you most desire – you might have to engage an ally.  Children work well for this purpose.  Your own if they’re young enough, the neighbors’ if need be, or paid child actors in extreme cases.  All they have to do is go to a likely member of your family and lisp out, “An awgile sweata would be a nice pweasent for Daddy.”  A presentation that cute is utterly irresistible.  Just to be sure you might prime the kid by giving them a catalog, newspaper ad or web address to hand over at just the right moment.

If none of these ideas do the trick, you could always fall back on asking directly.  Who knows? It might work.  After all, your family loves you and wouldn’t want to upset you–particularly since you’ve been behaving so strangely lately.

“Are you nuts?  What if she changes her mind?  Call her back right now and say you’ll go!”

“That wouldn’t be creative Dad,” he said in a not-quite-patient tone. It’s the same tone the cashier uses when I try to sneak eleven items in the ten-items-or-less line by claiming that hot dogs and buns go together naturally so they shouldn’t really count as two things.

Creative?  As it turns out it meant sending the young lady a mystery to solve.  My son left an encrypted message in her locker which directed her to the choir room where he’d hidden another message agreeing to go out with her.  When did dating turn into The DaVinci Code?

According to my two boys, the days of walking up to a girl, staring at your shoes and mumbling, “So you wanna go out sometime or something” are done.  Now it’s all about being interesting before the date even starts.

One website I found recommends writing the information about the date (time, location, appropriate dress, her share of the cost, how much of a dweeb you aren’t, etc.) on slips of paper and putting them into balloons.  Inflate the balloons with helium, deliver them and watch the squeaky-voiced fun as your date-to-be pops the balloons while wondering what kind of idiot can’t just ask her out.

Actually, I’m told that’s very romantic.  Personally, I think it’s a way for guys to try to duck rejection.  The thinking goes, “If I can just be creative enough she’ll melt and the deal will be sealed before she realizes she’s agreed to go out with a total goofball.”

It’s all about protecting the male ego.

We guys would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West in a thunderstorm if we knew what women actually thought of us.  The most fragile thing in the universe is the male ego.
That’s why nature has equipped all guys with an ego-protecting reality distortion field.  How else can you explain comb-overs, hairpieces, beer belles, and virtually all male fashions from the 70s?

The field has been positively identified by guy scientists at the Imaginary Institute for Guy Science.  In earlier, pre-scientific times it was known as the “rose-colored glasses” field or more recently “beer goggles”.  It works by taking any unpleasant information in the real world and turning it into something that a guy can accept.

If a woman points out that the bulge around a guy’s middle looks like a snow tire from a dump truck he hears, “I like a man with a little meat on him.”  A disparaging comment about a decades-old leisure suit with lapels wide enough to act as airplane runways  comes across as, “What a bold fashion statement.”  An observation about his limited intellectual gifts turns into, “You should run for public office.”

Safely wrapped in this field, nothing can harm a guy’s ego.  Except direct rejection from a female.  That’ll blast right through the field like a hit-man’s bullet through squealer’s pin-stripe suit.  The guy’s ego will be flat on it’s back bleeding before it has a chance to construct a plausible alternative explanation like she was rejecting some entirely different guy and the fellow who got hit just happened to be in the way.

All of the subterfuge that goes into asking girls out is just a way of deflecting the pain.  She wasn’t rejecting you, she was rejecting the balloons you sent.

Right.

I’m no stranger to dodging rejection.  The first time I asked my own personal wife out, I did it in the weeniest way possible –  through a mutual friend.  And the worst part was that I was already pretty sure she’d say yes.

In college I ran with a small crowd of other geeks.  We were like those meerkat families you see on TV, always getting up to mischief and trying to avoid the big dangerous animals which in this case meant the jocks, the academic stars, and pretty much anyone who wasn’t us.  By some magical happening, an attractive and very non-geek young woman was dating one of our number.

The time came when she decided to break up with him (possibly because of the company he kept).  She dropped by the dorm to tell us that she wouldn’t be seeing us any more and by an even more magical happening, I was the only one there.  In the course of the conversation she said, “You know, if I hadn’t been dating him I always thought I’d like to go out with you.”

My reality-distortion field had no idea how to handle this.  An extremely attractive person of the definitely opposite sex had just voiced an interest in me.  Drawing on every suave male role model I had ever seen (mostly from James Bond films and the occasional episode of Remington Steele) I took a deep breath and answered, “Ulp.”

It sounded exactly as if a large multi-winged insect had suddenly flown down my throat.  To ensure that she knew what an amazing hunk of manhood I was, I followed up with a witty comment.  “Ah…um….”

She assumed I was offended, terminated the conversation, and left.  I tortured myself for two days until I worked up the courage to ask another friend to ask her out on my behalf.  I operated under the assumption that she’d say “no” and I didn’t actually want to hear that with my own ears.

Except she said, “Yes.”

I think I’m glad creative date invites weren’t hip back then.  To protect my ego I’d probably have made a puzzle so complex that she’d still be working on the solution and I’d still be wondering if she’d go out with me.