Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 20, 1995                   TAG: 9509200010
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TIDBITS OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY LEAD TO FAMILY DYSFUNCTION

It doesn't pay.

Listen. I got a cordless phone for Christmas and do I ever get a chance to sit out on the deck with a drink and take important phone calls? No. I spend all my time in the kitchen talking to people selling jelly.

Do I know how to use the memory function or what that little button marked "flash" does? I don't want to know.

I bought a new calculator recently because the one I really knew and loved decided it didn't want to make decimal points anymore.

This new one shows the date and time - which you have to set, which makes you very nervous - and it has an alarm feature.

I never asked anybody to put an alarm clock in a calculator. That kind of thing leads to domestic dysfunction, unrest and hysteria.

I set the alarm without knowing what I was doing and it went off at 1:30 a.m. It made an awful, technological sound. Before we figured it out, we had thought these aliens were going to arrive any moment to take us up into their mother ship for unspeakable experiments.

I'd like to know why they didn't leave calculators alone after they got one that knew what is was doing in the way of addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division.

If these people have to have something to do, why don't they invent an XXL Tee-shirt, the neck of which doesn't cut off the breathing of certain pudgy persons?

To return to alarm clocks, however, I personally depend on my Baby Ben. You wind that sucker up, set the alarm and it's not going to wake you up until you want it to.

It's true that you have to set it for 6:30 a.m. if you want it to ring at 5:30 a.m., but that's not Baby Ben's fault. It's been knocked to the floor a lot during various nightmares.

I think you can see how easily I forgot all about Windows 95. A man who has a calculator with an alarm clock in it has enough to worry about.

I'm also deepy uninterested in interfacing, which is a good thing because I don't want to know what it is or why anybody would want to do it. Forget cyberspace while we're at it.

I have to go now. I've got some worrying to do about resetting the clock on the calculator when standard time - also known as God's Time - comes back.

I don't want to even think about resetting the date next February.