AM I THE ONLY ONE? NOW BE HONEST!

Am I the only one drowning in more stuff than I know how to name let alone use? I think not, but I think I am perhaps more shameless in admitting it. Let me explain, and see if you can throw me a lifeline...!

I am engulfed with phones of all shapes and sizes -- growing smaller by the year -- which advise me I can perform 101 apps with the flick of my thumb. Trouble is, my thumb is too thick to locate the apps, and my brain too 20th C to understand why I will ever want to access the weather in Iceland or the YouTube in Singapore.

I am faced with a TV set whose simple on/off, soft/loud controls have had multiple births. I am advised -- in fact I am ordered -- to zoom and pan across this program while recording up to 4 other programs simultaneously for later playback. What the set doesn't advise me is how to find programs worth watching in the first place.

I sit in a car with buzzing features, talking controls, automatic parking, plus the hands-free opportunity to call all my relatives in Florida and Arizona who never answered my calls even when they were in Chicago.

I sit in front of an Internet screen featuring keys I have never understood and dare not touch, coupled with periodic pop-ups which instruct me what to turn on and turn off; plus periodic shut-downs while someone inside this contraption performs things that sound positively pornographic. Actually, this entire panoply of glittering gadgetry intimidates me in the same way my controlling mother-in-law once did. But at least in her case, she slept at night. I'm convinced this machine never sleeps.

I know, I know, this harangue can easily be dismissed as some antiquarian grousing about progress. Maybe. But how do you know these systems actually sleep at night, and not plot with one another for the next day...? Laugh if you will, but it's the same question you've never been able to answer about the light in your refrigerator...!