If you have any of the following symptoms, you may be a victim of technology...

• Your stationery is more cluttered than Warren Beatty's address book. The letterhead lists a fax number, e-mail addresses for two on-line services, and your Internet address, which spreads across the breath of the letterhead and continues to the back. In essence, you have conceded that the fist page of any letter you write *is* letterhead.
• You never sat through an entire movie without having at least one device on your body beep or buzz.
• You need to fill out a form that must be typewritten, but you can't because there isn't one typewriter in your house--only computers with laser printers.
• You think of the gadgets in your office as "friends", but you forget to send your mother a birthday card.
• You disdain people who use low baud rates.
• When you go into a computer store, you eavesdrop on a salesperson talking with customers--and you butt in to correct him and spend the next twenty minutes answering the customers' questions, while the salesperson stands by silently, nodding his head.
• You know Bill Gates's email address, but you have to look up your own social security number.
• You stop saying "phone number" and replace it with "voice number," since we all know the majority of phones lines in any house are plugged into contraptions that talk to other contraptions.
• You sign your Christmas cards with :–) next to your signature.
• Off the top of your head, you can think of nineteen keystroke symbols that are far more clever than :–).
• You think jokes about being unable to program a VCR are stupid.
• On vacation, you are reading a computer manual and turning the pages faster than everyone else is reading John Grisham novels.
• The thought that CD could refer to finance or music has never occurred to you.
• You are able to argue persuasively that the Ross Perot phrase "electronic town hall" makes more sense than the "information superhighway", but you don't because, after ail, the man still uses hand-drawn pie charts.
• You go to computer trade shows a map out your path of the exhibit hall in advance. But you can't give someone directions to your house without looking up the street names.
• You would rather get more dots per inch than miles per gallon.
• You know without a doubt that disks come in five-and-a-quarter and three-and-a-half inch sizes.
• You own a set of itty-bitty screw-drivers and you actually know where they are.
• While contemporaries swap stories about their recent hernia surgeries, you compare mouse-induced index-finger strain with a nine-year-old.
• You are so knowledgeable about technology that you feel secure enough to say "I don't know" when someone asks you a technology question instead of feeling compelled to make something up.
• You rotate your screen savers more frequently than your automobile tires.
• You have a functioning home copier machine, but every toaster you own turns bread into charcoal.
• You have ended friendships because of irreconcilably different opinions about which is better - the track ball or the track pad.
• You understand all these jokes.

And if this is so, my friend, technology has taken over your life. We suggest, for your own good, that you go lie under a tree and write a haiku in praise of Elvis. And don't use a laptop.