North Star Writers Group

One of the more frequently played commercials at the moment is the one about (company) making our interactions with robots more natural and acceptable to the public. That’s nice and all, but not being the type to get overly excited about my interactions with something that can’t hug me, I have a better challenge for our scientists.

To use my favorite science word, I hypothesize that the brilliant minds who came up with the control/alt/delete option on our computers can also make one of these for my life! Sure, it would be a challenge, but imagine the rewards they would reap! It would be better than the cloned sheep! It would make more money than any bird flu vaccination.

Besides, how fun would the experiments be? I’d certainly volunteer to be a test subject, as long as I was the only one at my company allowed to participate. After all, this would give me an edge that goes above and beyond any energy drink, college degree or promotion could!

The whole thing would work a little like TIVO, I guess. I could look back at my most recent statement or action, and simply stop myself right before I say or do them with my Control/Alt/Delete button. The conversation would start over after a brief period of rest, and I’d be much better off.

To prove it, I spent one day tracking the things I did where this handy-dandy invention could have altered the course of my future. And this is just one day!

Impulse Buying. We’ve all been there. It even has a cool name from psychology called “buyer’s remorse.” But if only I could Control/Alt/Delete the fact that I had to buy fresh flowers for my house, knowing full well that I’m going to be out of town for the next five days, I could’ve instead put $25 in my kid’s college fund. According to your financial planner, that probably would have been $5,000 by the time she’s 18. What was I thinking?

Sharing my Real Feelings at a Meeting. How did that slip out? I didn’t really mean to say that my co-worker was loud and obnoxious and that I wasn’t sure if I could stand one more meeting with him. Just like Austin Powers, I’ve lost my inner monologue! It doesn’t happen often, but man, if I had a Control/Alt/Delete button on my mouth, nobody would think of me as a witch come tomorrow.

Watching Jeopardy. Bottom line: Always makes me feel stupid, and who needs help in that category? Sadly, this will be on my list again tomorrow, too, because I live under the illusion that I’ll remember some of what’s on the show and impress my family at next year’s Trivial Pursuit Showdown after Thanksgiving Dinner.

Volunteering to do the Grocery Shopping. This is the one chore I absolutely cannot stand, but once my husband has done it five, six, 20 times in a row, I get a guilt complex. What would “21 times” have really have hurt? Instead, I spent more than an hour doing what probably should have taken 10 minutes because instead of focusing on the aisle signs, I wandered around contemplating my big meeting mistake instead. That Control/Alt/Delete would have taken two things off this list! Instead, I went back to the milk and eggs aisle four times.

Convincing Myself it Really Could Wait ‘til Tomorrow. I’ll be up at 4:30 a.m. to make up for that. Don’t lie – you’ve been there!

Getting Sucked into Reading Product Reviews That I Know Are Crap. I’d be amiss if I didn’t have at least one mention of wasted time on the Internet. We need a baby gate and I actually read all 56 comments on the Babies R Us web site. The problem? I know fully well that tons of those things are placed by marketers and other employees of the manufacturer under disguise names. I am not going to share how I know this – but I do. This colossal waste of time wasn’t even fun. Heck, I could have been tackling the project that’s the subject of number five instead!

Here’s hoping that you made it through this column without committing your own version of Control/Alt/Delete, and that somewhere, some day, a scientist agrees with me and gets to work!

I would close with one of my favorite standard lines, which is “Cheers,” but I’m pretty sure that means I’d also need to Control/Alt/Delete having had an alcoholic drink on a work night, and I’ve a feeling that more than six incidents per day might make the whole system crash.

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This is Column # CD13. Request permission to publish here.