Stick-N-Find is the technology for me, the perennial loser.

I don’t mean “loser” the way most people do, to describe somebody perpetually down on his luck, although that could apply to me too.

No, I mean it in the literal sense: I am constantly misplacing stuff.

My wallet, for example, goes AWOL a lot. In the winter, it’s easier to keep track of, jammed in my coat pocket along with various receipts, pens and lint. In the summer, though, it lives a third of the time in my car, a third of the time in my back pocket and a third of the time, I guess, on Tralfamadore, the alien planet in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” where earthlings are displayed in an intergalactic zoo.

With Stick-N-Find technology, I could affix a bottle-cap-sized disc to my wallet and then send a low-energy radio signal from my iPhone that would help me home in. (By the way, I’m not being an Apple elitist by name-dropping the iPhone, as it’s one of the few devices that can pick up on Stick-N-Find signals. Take that, Android users.)

The new gizmos were on display at a trade show in Barcelona, Spain, recently. My boss wouldn’t pay for me to cover it live, so I had to settle for an Associated Press story.

As soon as I read about Stick-N-Finds, I knew what they were: real-life versions of Spider-Man’s spider tracers, tiny metal arachnids that our hero sticks to suspects or on villains’ getaway vehicles so that he can find them later. Once again, life imitates art.

Currently, Stick-N-Find technology is prohibitively expensive. At $25 each, I can’t afford them for my wallet, car keys, television remote control, shoes, favorite shirt, dog leash, glasses, glasses case, stapler, tape dispenser, screwdriver and hammer. But if the price came down — say, to a dollar or two — I’d have more radio waves buzzing around my house than a 100,000-watt FM station.

With these little gizmos, I would never again search fruitlessly in a closet for my favorite tie only to find it draped around the dog’s neck two rooms away. Or locate the whereabouts of a shaving cream bottle inadvertently wedged behind two piles of clean towels.

I know Stick-N-Finds would also be great for my marriage, which is constantly under stress from the forces of misplacement. See, my wife is a loser too — otherwise, why would she marry me — compounded by her penchant for throwing away items of financial value

Many an early morning has found me Dumpster-diving in my own trash cans, separating eggshells, napkins and other refuse in a vain attempt to find an unpaid water bill or an important tax document. I pity clerks who must open return envelopes from Casa Schillig, smudged as they are with butter and grease, smelling like a troll’s unwashed armpit.

My wife’s greatest accomplishment (to date) was shredding one of my paychecks, thinking it was just a stub. I tried to tape it back together, creating a sort of Frankencheck, but the bank wouldn’t even consider it. I’m pretty sure the teller was laughing from behind her glass window.

Stick-N-Find would help me with my female Jack the Ripper by allowing me to affix homing devices to important pieces of paper and locate them inside the house (where they inevitably turn up) before I spend 20 minutes rooting through garbage.

Besides my wallet, the item I would most want to Stick-N-Find is a book, “1,100 Words You Need to Know,” a massive tome I use when teaching. That book is the literary version of Jimmy Hoffa, but unlike Jimmy, it eventually turns up — after I’ve bought a replacement. A few years ago, after a copy disappeared for months, I found it in a pile of books discarded by a colleague. Last month, after sending out an embarrassingly pleading email to fellow teachers, I found it stuffed between the pages of another, even larger, book.

A Stick-N-Find would have lopped hours off my search. Indeed, it wasn’t until I stopped looking that the darn thing showed up, which is always the way. There’s an old saying that lost items appear only when the devil is finished with them.

If that’s the case, I hope Old Scratch’s time with “1,100 Words You Need to Know” has netted him an impressive vocabulary, maybe one he uses while explaining my wallet to visitors at the zoo on Tralfamadore.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published March 7, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

Any student who has suffered through my class knows my policy on exclamation points: You get only two a year, so use them wisely.

Actually, the quantity and duration change every time I tell it, and savvy students — the ones who aren’t sleeping or glancing surreptitiously at cellphones every few minutes — sometimes call me out. “Didn’t you say last week that we get two exclamation points each quarter, Mr. S?” (Almost nobody can pronounce Schillig without making it sound like Austrian currency, so Mr. S is acceptable shorthand. Maybe I should change my name to Euro.)

Yes, it’s true I inform some students that they can use three exclamation points a year, some four. In a moment of unexpected largesse, I once offered up five, which is unbridled craziness.

The exact number doesn’t matter as much as the expectation that budding writers think of the exclamation point as an endangered species (something to be cherished) or a rich dessert (something to be enjoyed only occasionally). To throw in one more metaphor, if periods are common nails of the punctuation toolbox, then exclamation points are drywall screws — expensive, more difficult to use, and appropriate for only certain types of sentences and situations.

If a piece of information is so earthshaking that it will rattle the souls of all who read it, an exclamation point is warranted. “Martians Invade!” or “World Ends!” are such headlines. “Mary’s dating Tom again!” is not, in most cases — unless you’re Mary or Tom.

Short of impending, immediate violence — “I’ll kill you!” — most exclamation points are unnecessary. If you’ve written a piece well, the emotion is conveyed without the need for special punctuation, and readers are better served by deciding for themselves how much emotion a given statement deserves.

I also make it clear to students that no matter how many exclamation points I allow them, under no circumstances should the marks be used simultaneously. Even “World Ends!” doesn’t merit two exclamation points, because what do you do you write the next day? “World Returns!!”?

For the record, I must also acknowledge my own hypocrisy. While I am a card-carrying member of the Anti-Exclamation League, I am simultaneously and contradictorily a member of the slippery Emoticons Embracers Ltd. (EEL), which supports the use of smiley faces and sad faces created with punctuation. So recipients of my electronic messages are often besieged with or — but never or because I find noses to be a waste of perfectly good hyphens.

Now, granted, I never use emoticons in serious writing, where I want words alone to represent me. But email and texting are different: They’re kissing cousins to verbal communication, where audiences often derive meaning from a speaker’s facial expressions or hand gestures. Minus these, the well-placed smiley face does yeoman’s work. A reader may be offended by “You’re crazy,” but never by “You’re crazy :),” which excuses a multitude of linguistic sins.

In other words, I’m not going to risk an angry spouse by typing “What a stupid idea” in a text message when I can instead put, “What a stupid idea :)” and provide myself with an automatic JK defense, which is admissible in most courts.

(I’ve never had a chance to use it in writing, but I’m fascinated by the emoticon for Slash, the ex-guitar player of Guns N’ Roses, which looks like this: iiii];) and represents the guitarist’s signature hat and cigarette, but only if you cock your head like the RCA dog can you see it.)

Further examples of hypocrisy can be found in my hatred of all instant-message abbreviations, including LOL, B4N, IMHO, NSFW, YOLO and the above-mentioned JK.* None of these aids communication; they are shortcuts for lazy writers, an argument that could also be made for emoticons. Hence, the hypocrisy.

So to summarize my writing advice in reverse order: don’t use abbreviations, emoticons are OK unless you’re writing the Great American Novel or a formal paper, and go easy on the exclamation points, to the tune of about two a year (unless I’ve told you more at another time).

Otherwise, you will incur the wrath of an English teacher!!! Or at least one’s righteous indignation. Well, this one’s, anyway.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

*For the Internet illiterate, these are laugh out loud, ‘bye for now, in my honest opinion, not safe for work (an off-color joke, for example), you only live once and just kidding.

Originally published July 5, 2012, in The Alliance Review.

If I’m being totally honest here, I may be afraid of forgetting names more often than I actually forget them. Fear of forgetting — or being forgotten — is athazagoraphobia, which is a word that virtually begs to be forgotten.

Regardless, my problem could be solved with a pair of these wicked, hypothetical, future specs, just as a smart phone’s GPS feature has solved directional impairment for many people. I want to see little Johnny’s name materialize on a screen next to my eye, even as a tiny angelic choir celebrates my relief with a spirited rendition of Hallelujah in my hippocampus.

Now if Google can just develop a pair of glasses to make me invisible, I’d say the future was bright, indeed.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

Dear Harried Business Executive,

By monitoring employees’ social media postings, we, the Executive Veneration Institute of Logistics, have noticed that your workers have a tendency to share opinions on sensitive issues related to your business.

These posts exhibit a startling tendency on the part of your underlings to think for themselves, a trait that should be stamped out like a wildfire whenever it ignites. Only last week, one of your wage slaves had the temerity to post a disparaging Facebook comment about a restaurant owned by a man whose second cousin twice removed was the college roommate of your business manager. The wording of said message was most inflammatory, consisting of “Broccoli undercooked, sux 2 B U,” which would surely cause a disruption in the normal flow of commerce if the connection between the hourly desk jockey and your august business were discovered by parties unfavorable to your delicate position in the community.

Two months ago, another minion of your company sent a Twitter message (”tweet” is the term in common usage among the proletariat) that indicated a preference for one political party over another. You would correctly surmise that he was on the side of the jackasses, and that the message was not flattering to the GOP, to which you sold your own soul many decades ago in exchange for continued tax breaks and a senator on speed dial.

These two communiques would not, in and of themselves, constitute a dire threat to your corporate power position. Both wage workers could easily be implicated in a lipstick-smudged love nest and fired in accordance with “The Modern Machiavelli’s Rules of Gaining and Maintaining Power in the Corporate Boardroom,” after all.

However, we fear that the two miscreants and their unauthorized use of social media are merely the seeds of a trend that, if left unchecked, could sprout riotous weeds to choke the life from your financial rose garden.

We advise a swift and immediate revision of your employee handbook to signal the gravity of the situation to the glassy-eyed servants in your employ. With so many of the unwashed masses out of work, these fortunate few who are benefactors of near-living wages as a result of your corporate largesse should not be allowed delusions of freedom of speech, and your handbook revisions should reflect this.

Let your employees know, in no uncertain terms, that their lives both on and off the clock belong to you. Part and parcel of this ownership is complete control of their off-duty musings on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and any other shallow social media watering holes to which their thirsty fingers may take them.

Next, have your hired hands sign a document indicating their complete submission to the divine right of corporations, which is no less than that enjoyed by monarchs in earlier, happier times before the advent of modern impediments to productivity, such as the 40-hour work week, child labor laws and retirement benefits.

To aid you in this endeavor, the Executive Veneration Institute of Logistics will — for a modest annual fee — monitor the online lives of all your employees and report to you instantly, and in triplicate, when a breach of policy is uncovered. (And, believe us, such breaches will be uncovered. American workers have the most ridiculously endearing sense of entitlement when it comes to their pathetic little opinions.)

Between the shoring up of your policies and our policing of your workers’ off-the-clock lives, we can ensure that the only messages sent to your adoring public are ones that correspond precisely with your mission and position statements.

For an additional fee, we can also offer surveillance of your employees’ activities unrelated to the Internet. If you want to know where they go, with whom they interact, and even how they vote, give us a call.

I remain, as always, your faithful servant (although one who, like you, is not bound by the same standards of decorum that you expect from your employees),

Dewey Catchall

Director of Retention

Executive Veneration Institute of Logistics (EVIL)

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

Here is this week’s column:

Self-checkout lanes may soon be going the way of the dodo, according to recent reports.

It can’t happen soon enough. Short of employees who drop-kick customers in the pants when they ask questions, I can’t imagine a more surefire way to alienate buyers.

Here’s a scenario that has played out numerous times: I’m ringing up items in a self-checkout lane while two or more employees stand nearby, blithely ignoring that I can’t get the scanner to recognize a box of Wild Grape Pop Tarts and nattering on about how long they’re working that day (usually six whole hours), how stupid/ineffective/smelly their immediate superior is (very/very/very) or how one of their kids shoved graham crackers up his nose (a feat achievable only after much soaking in apple juice. The crackers, not the kid).

Meanwhile, a computer voice announces that I should “hang on” because “help is on the way.” But it’s not — at least not until the climaxes of the stories above, which are as long as “War and Peace” and “Crime and Punishment” combined. This, despite the waving of my arms and pointing to my watch (actually my cell phone), international symbols for “Hurry up, you dopes, don’t you know that ‘Dancing with the Stars’ starts in eight-and-a-half minutes?”

Eventually, one of the slack-jawed zombies makes her way to my side, where she solves my dilemma (and believe me, she makes it clear that it’s my problem from her glassy stare and barely stifled yawn) by pulling a swipe card from deep within some rolls of skin and waving it in front of the scanner, usually without explaining why the Pop Tarts were able to resist being UPC’d in the first place.

That’s when I realize that what I need isn’t an employee, but one of those magic swipe cards. I’m surprised grocery stores don’t start hanging one in every aisle, right next to a bottle of bleach and some paper towels that you can use when the clueless so-and-so who checked out before you leaves blood on the conveyor belt from a leaking package of pork. Why should employees do anything?

But when I told my wife how happy I will be to never again ring up my own purchases, she reminded me about Snotty Lady, and now I’m not so sure.

Snotty Lady, whom I had the displeasure to meet a few weeks ago, wasn’t really snotty, at least not in the “I hope you eat worms, you puny mortal” sense. No, she was literally snotty, blowing her nose on a balled-up tissue that she left on the top of her register, mopping up nasal discharge the consistency of Italian dressing by running her palm vertically down her nostrils, and then touching the valued-customer card that I held in my trembling hand.

She was the modern equivalent of Typhoid Mary, and she had her hands on every item we purchased. Yuck. At least at the self-checkout lane, I know where my hands have been.

The grocery store isn’t the only place where technology alienates me. I work for two progressive employers who have installed motion-sensor lighting, presumably on the assumption that we proles are not smart enough to turn out the lights when leaving a room. (What’s that say about the management that hired us?)

Because most of my work is sedentary — paginating newspaper pages doesn’t involve a lot of motion, and neither does grading papers, unless I’m pounding my head against a desk and muttering “Why? Why? Why?,” something I’ve done in both endeavors — these motion-detecting lights often turn off while I’m at my desk. At one job, the solution is to wave my arms in the air, causing the Sensor in the Skylight to recognize that a living, breathing human — albeit a seldom-moving one — is in the house (yo! yo!), and the lights come back on.

At the other job, however, I have to stand up and make several steps toward the center of the room before the lights flicker on. That, or send a document to the printer, the shaking of which is enough to fool the sensor into turning on the lights.

Since I’m invisible to the help at grocery stores and invisible to motion-detecting sensors at work, I’ve developed an inferiority complex, which I blame on technology. To this end, I’m considering a lawsuit against Bill Gates and the estate of the late Steve Jobs.

But the way society is “advancing,” I’d likely be forced to serve as my own attorney in front of a robotic judge and wave my arms periodically to keep the lights on in the courtroom, so why bother? Human interaction, it seems, is following the dodo into extinction.

Here is today’s column, as seen in The Alliance Review:

I received an email a few weeks ago from a sender who urged me to follow the “international academic standards for email response time,” which is apparently 72 hours.

I had a good laugh at this because it sounds ridiculously formal. I picture a coterie of bearded old men in a posh private library or study, leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, puffing pipes and shaking their heads disconsolately as one of them says, “Egad, old Smith from the Audubon Society fired off a request for information on the mating habits of the Hoary Redpoll last week and I simply must respond posthaste or risk violating the international academic standards for email response time.”

“Jolly good show, that,” responds one of the other professorial types, signaling Jeeves for another martini and sinking back into his copy of Proust.

I googled “academic standards for email response time” and found not a single reference, which really doesn’t prove anything other than the term is more obscure than the Hoary Redpoll. The closest I came is a website called netm@atters.com. In answer to the question, “What is the rule for how fast you should be responding to emails?,” the site unhelpfully offers, “As soon as you can.”

Here in the real world, far removed from the ivory towers of academia, we proles who are the dubious benefactors of dozens of email “requests” that trickle down from our human and machine overlords often see responding to email as one more item on our to-do lists, somewhere between “toil unceasingly for the man” and “pick up milk on the way home.” The only pecking order among digital correspondences is determining which ones we have to answer immediately and which ones can be saved for another day. In other words, which must I answer to keep the boss off my @$$?

Some sort of email defense mechanism is necessary. On average, I receive around 10 messages an hour from four separate accounts during a typical work day. Some of this is ridiculous pap that can be safely ignored, a few are ridiculous pap that nevertheless require a response, and one out of every, oh, three dozen, is genuinely important. And my email tallies are small compared to some people, who wish they were juggling only 10 requests an hour.

Personally, I try to answer most email promptly, if only because I seldom open messages more than once. My own interpretation of “international academic standards for email response time” is about six hours, with many responses clocking in at less than an hour. If you haven’t heard from me before the sun sets on your original query, one of two things has occurred: I’ve either not seen your message or I’m ignoring you.

A few months ago, I had what I thought was a brainstorm and set two of my larger work-based accounts to forward email to my home account, which is tied to my cellphone, which chimes or vibrates whenever a message is received. This way, wherever I was, my email was just a pants pocket away, and I could stay in touch.

Now, when I’m out to dinner on a Saturday night or at the movies or just lounging on the couch, my pocket is literally buzzing with messages. My students submit essays digitally, and many wait until my traditional 11:59 p.m. deadline (midnight is just too scary) to share. Since I receive individual email notifications for each essay, my phone beeps and buzzes incessantly, making it sound like there’s an out-of-control party in my pants.

At my age, it’s often the most exciting thing that happens there.

Come to think of it, if getting email was always this exciting, there would be no need for silly rules like the 72-hour “international academic standards for email response time.”

Here is last week’s column from The Alliance Review:

It’s all fun and games until somebody deciphers the molecular structure of an enzyme.

Players of the online game Foldit did exactly that last month, breaking the code of a retroviral protease (yeah, I didn’t know what it was either) from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. The protease has flummoxed scientists for years, yet the gamers, working collaboratively, figured it out in 10 days.

Once molecular structures of such enzymes have been decoded, researchers could develop drugs to stop their spread. Hence, the world is one step closer to an AIDS vaccine thanks to video gamers.

Nobody has suggested firing the scientists who spent a decade working unsuccessfully to crack the code, which would be the obvious move when untrained amateurs accomplish more in less time, so we must look in other directions for lessons from this triumph.

First, it vindicates gamers who have lived for years in their parents’ basements, sacrificing personal hygiene and social lives in the name of higher scores on “Call of Duty” or “Mortal Kombat.” Now when their mothers try to shame them off the couch and into jobs — even if it’s only picking up pizza boxes littering the floor around them — they can justifiably say, “Aw, Ma, I’m cracking the crystal structure of a retroviral protease here. Leave me alone!”

I know a guy who routinely assured his parents that his addiction to video games would help later in life when he was behind the cockpit of a fighter jet. This was back in the days of the Atari 2600, with a controller that consisted of a joystick and one red button. The last time I checked, the average fighter jet cockpit was slightly more complicated. My acquaintance never got close to one, thank goodness, although he did eventually graduate to the Nintendo game system. Secondly — and more seriously — the Foldit success is an example of how intrinsic motivation is more effective than more common carrot-and-stick methods. Researchers and writers such as Edward Deci and Daniel Pink have cataloged many instances of people working on a project because they want to easily outperforming people working on a project because they have to.

Deci first demonstrated this decades ago in experiments with volunteers and puzzles. As long as volunteers were solving puzzles because they wanted to, they worked longer at the task, even during free time when they weren’t required to do so. On the other hand, volunteers who were paid to work on the same puzzles did so only during proscribed times and were far less likely to work on them during free time. Getting paid to do something fun equals “work,” which is no longer fun, and one’s internal motivation goes right out the window.

Pink has collected similar studies, noting surprising differences in the ways money motivates us. The bottom line: For tasks that involve little thought, higher pay and bonuses tied to productivity are good motivators. For tasks that involve even rudimentary creativity and thought, however, increased pay and bonuses decrease internal motivation and cause employees to produce less. (Politicians and taxpayers who favor merit-pay systems for teachers, take note.)

If researchers who turned to video game players for help with the monkey-virus puzzle had offered money, they might not have their solution.

Finally, the video gamers’ success is a perfect illustration of the “hive mind” at work. If two heads are better than one, how exponentially more powerful are thousands of heads? Crowdsourcing, or harnessing large groups to do tasks usually reserved for highly trained individuals, is gaining traction as a way to solve problems, replacing the image of the dedicated researcher toiling in solitude late into the night.

While I’m impressed with the video gamers’ accomplishments in science, I won’t be completely sold until they unravel a few more of life’s great mysteries. Call me when they find the lost Roanoke colony, the Mary Celeste, the identity of Jack the Ripper, or Jimmy Hoffa’s remains.

Only then will I trade my full-time job for a spot on the basement couch.

Here’s my column from June 9, as originally seen in The (Alliance) Review:

Statistically speaking, you’re much safer flying than driving, but most people suffer more angst getting into a plane than a car.

I was thinking about this during a recent flight and trying to decide why. Maybe it’s tied to fear of falling, a common phobia; we might crash in cars, but we plummet from planes. Maybe it’s because familiarity breeds complacency; most of us ride in automobiles often, but fly infrequently. Maybe it’s because as drivers, we control our own destinies, while as plane passengers, we entrust ourselves to others. Or maybe it’s because car accidents are seldom national news, while plane crashes, being more rare, almost always make the front page or the top of the network evening broadcast.

But ultimately, I believe it’s because only on planes are we told the worst-case scenarios moments before the trip begins, when flight attendants run through all the things that could go wrong with the little puddle-jumper or jumbo jet onto which we are strapped.

If a grinning, sexually ambiguous person in a blue nylon jumper popped out on my dashboard each morning to remind me that, in the event of an emergency, my seat could be used as a floatation device, I might be more apt to fear driving.

There is nothing quite like having a lesson in oxygen-mask use to make one reach the point of hyperventilation. No need to tell me to put on my mask first before attending to any children; believe me, if any kid is sitting nearby, I’m grabbing his mask, too.

As if this isn’t enough, hapless passengers next receive a quick reminder of where emergency exits are located, although flight attendants rarely take the time to stand in the row next to the exits to show clearly where they are. Instead, they have developed some mime-like system of hand gestures, pointing down the aisle, thrusting their index fingers diagonally like a “Saturday Night Fever”-era John Travolta, and then poking their thumbs behind them, presumably to show us that they are taking their chances in the cockpit while the rest of us are torn apart in a depressurized cabin.

Life is full of places where these blue-garbed, smiling messengers of potential doom could be useful. I’d love to see them in a Starbucks restroom, reminding patrons that the stalls are cleaned only once a day, have been out of toilet paper since the breakfast rush six hours before, and are often visited by people who push all their worldly possessions in shopping carts.

“If the smell becomes too repugnant, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling,” they could offer cheerily. “Please be sure to properly position your oxygen mask before attending to any children.”

I’d also like to see flight attendants at the grocery, warning patrons of the dangers posed by people who shop in store-provided Hoveround or Rascal motorized scooters. They drive like they’ve just opened up their Harley-Davidson full-throttle on the interstate, and woe to any two-legged shopper standing in the middle of the cookie aisle.

“Please place your complimentary shin guards in the upright position at this time,” the attendant could say. “The manager will turn off the ’shin guard’ sign when it is safe for you to walk about the store. Until then, please maintain your cart in a defensive shopping mode.”

I’ve often wanted to see an Old West-style showdown in the middle of the frozen foods aisle between two shoppers on motorized scooters, neither of them willing to go around the other. In the background, the theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” blares and tumbleweeds blow. The two combatants size up one another, the last box of Tony’s Pizza equidistant between them. They squint, they grimace, they rev their engines. They drop their scooters into gear and the world falls away …

But I digress. We could also use flight attendants to warn us about the dangers of marriage (”Before you take this man to be your lawfully wedded spouse, pay close attention to the prenuptial agreements at each exit …”), school (”Smoking is not permitted in the building at any time, including in the restrooms.”) and work (”This is a non-stop job that lands at retirement in 40-plus years — if you’re lucky!”).

Having flight attendants in places other than planes might not make us fear flying any less, but they might keep us too busy worrying about life’s other dangers to mind a little turbulence mid-flight.

Today’s column from The Alliance Review:

Tell any supposed computer guru that your machine isn’t working and he or she will ask the same question: Did you restart?

The restart option must be page one, paragraph one, of every textbook in computer fix-it academies, just as “sit down and shut up” is the opening chapter of every teaching manual. Surprisingly, it often works. (So does “sit down and shut up,” for that matter.)

I have this theory that, like snowflakes or fingerprints, no two computers are the same. Instead, each one is a unique mixture of hardware, software and files, all sloshing around like pickles in a barrel of brine. Who knows how all those disparate pieces interact, and what weird cyber-schizophrenia can result?

The restart option is like the cleanup guys who show up the morning after a big storm to take away fallen tree limbs. We’re glad to see them, but if they’re needed every day, we might want to reexamine where we’re living and consider moving where the weather is less extreme.

Restart is that way. If I had a dollar for every time a computer tech has told me to restart, I could afford to take my wife out to dinner at one of those swank restaurants where nothing on the menu is printed in English and the entrée is a piece of meat the size of a thimble, emerging from a bed of lettuce like the goddess Venus emerges from a seashell in a Botticelli painting.

Why do we need to restart so often, and why do we accept this as a valid solution to computer problems? If the unexamined life is not worth living, as somebody famous once asserted, then we need to examine why we’ve become a society of tech heads with index fingers constantly at the ready.

Since computers have infiltrated every facet of our lives, this is a serious problem. Most new cars have computer chips somewhere in their gizzards, so will we one day reach a point where we stop every few miles to turn the ignition off and on?

“Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?”

“I’m sorry, officer, but the speedometer wasn’t working. I think I need to restart the car.”

Or how about on a transcontinental flight? “Passengers, this is your pilot. Unfortunately, we need to restart the plane, which will necessitate a landing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Flight attendants will be by shortly to show you how to restart your oxygen masks and seat belts.”

If this restart thing becomes more widespread, it could become a figure of speech for any poor performance, anywhere. Little Johnny having trouble in school? He needs a restart. Bad job review at work? Hit the button. Underperforming in bed? Restart, maybe twice.

All these actions could be accompanied by a little push on the belly button, followed by an approximation of that ominous noise computers make when they fire back up again, the one that sounds like James Earl Jones chanting “Ohm” in a Tibetan monastery. It would diffuse stress and refocus us on the task at hand.

I’m sure my wife would love if I had a real restart button, one she could press every time I put off painting the basement by using the lame excuse that the cement from the waterproofing job hasn’t “cured” yet (it’s been almost a year), or whenever she tells me something really important and I don’t listen.

Restart. Restart. Restart.

It’s something to ponder the next time your computer is frozen and the guru you depend on to help you through can offer only a shoulder shrug and a one-word, two-syllable solution that you’ve heard too many times before.

As for me, the next time I have a bad day, I’m going to poke myself in the stomach, click my heels together three times, and hope I wake up back in bed, ready to restart and make it a better one.