On a demographics survey given at our high school, students were asked, "What disadvantages do you see in having children?" Usual answers included "It's expensive to raise kids" and "They take up a lot of your time."

But one boy was not worried about money or responsibility. He wrote, "If I have children, I might have to drive a minivan."

After being on the phone forever with a customer who had been having difficulties with a computer program, a support technician at my mother's company turned in his report: "The problem resides between the keyboard and the chair."

The day before my graduation from Soldan High School in St. Louis, the principal called an assembly. He wanted to say farewell informally, he explained, as he reviewed our years together. There was hardly a dry eye among us as he concluded, "We will remember you, and hope you will remember us; more importantly, we want you to remember each other. I want all of you to meet in this very auditorium 25 years from today."

There was a moment of silence; then a thin voice piped up, "What time?"

I was inspecting communications facilities in Alaska. Since I had little experience flying in small planes, I was nervous when we approached a landing strip in a snow-covered area. The pilot descended to just a couple hundred feet, then gunned both engines, climbed and circled back. While my heart pounded, the passenger next to me seemed calm. "I wonder why the pilot didn't land," I said.

"He was checking to see if the landing strip was plowed," the man replied.

As we made a second approach, I glanced out the window. "It looks plowed to me," I commented.

"No," my neighbor replied. "It hasn't been cleared for some time."

"How can you tell?" I asked.

"Because," the man informed me, "I'm the guy who drives the plow."

My nephew, a flight attendant, split the back of his pants one day during a flight. To save embarrassment, he decided to work in front of the beverage cart, facing forward. The arrangement worked perfectly until he got to the last row and a passenger leaned over to him and said in a low voice, "Your fly is open."  

Each new patient at the clinic where I work must fill out a questionnaire asking basic health and personal-history questions. One query that inevitably gets a "No" answer is, "Do you now use or have you ever used recreational drugs?"

We were unprepared for the response of a young newlywed who wrote: "Yes—birth-control pills."

 

 

A co-worker asked if I knew what to do about a computer problem that was preventing her from getting e-mail. After calling the help desk, I told my colleague that e-mail was being delayed to check for a computer virus.

"It's a variant of the I Love You virus, only worse," I said.

"What could be worse?" my single co-worker asked wryly. "The Let's Just Be Friends virus?"

 

 

Blood may be thicker than water, but baseball beats them both. I learned this after explaining to my two boys that they were half-Lithuanian on their father's side, and half-Yankee, meaning their other set of parents came from an old New England family.

My younger son looked worried. "But we're still a hundred percent Red Sox, right, Mom?"

 

 

I was halfway through a meeting with a photocopy salesman, when he suddenly mentioned his wife and children, and how contented he was. I was puzzled, but let him continue. It was only when I glanced down that I understood his reason for imparting this personal information: The table leg against which I had been rubbing my itchy foot wasn't a table leg at all!

 

 

I hate the idea of going under the knife. So I was very upset when the doctor told me I needed a tonsillectomy. Later, the nurse and I were filling out an admission form. I tried to respond to the questions, but I was so nervous I couldn't speak. The nurse put down the form, took my hands in hers and said, "Don't worry. This medical problem can easily be fixed, and it's not a dangerous procedure."

"You're right. I'm being silly," I said, feeling relieved. "Please continue."

"Good. Now," the nurse went on, "do you have a living will?"

 

 

I am an oral surgeon, and once I was scheduled to extract four wisdom teeth from Jim, a high-school football player, who had opted to be sedated for the procedure. As the intravenous anesthesia was being administered, I asked Jim how he was feeling.

"Man," he replied, struggling to keep his eyes open, "I feel like I'm in English class."

 

 

My son, age 13, was sick in bed with bronchitis, and although he showed some general improvement, his harsh cough persisted and could be heard all over the house. Worried, too, that he was missing so much school, I went into his room to see how he felt.

There he was, propped up in bed, earphones on, listening to a baseball game—while the tape recorder coughed on and on. The next morning he was in school.

During the mortgage closing on our summer house, my wife and I were asked to sign documents containing small print. When I asked if I should read it, my attorney replied, "Legally, you should. But here's the bottom line: If you pay your installments on time, there is nothing in there that could harm you. Should you stop paying, however, there is definitely nothing in the small print that can save you."  

Bad weather meant I was stuck overnight at O'Hare airport in Chicago. Along with hotel accommodations, the airline issued each passenger a $10 meal ticket, or "chit." That evening after dinner I presented my meal ticket to the cashier. "Is this chit worth $10?" I asked. Looking up nervously, the cashier responded, "I'm sorry, sir. Was the meal that bad?"  

Late one night I stopped at one of those 24-hour gas station mini-marts to get myself a fresh brewed cup of coffee. When I picked up the pot, I could not help noticing that the brew was as black as asphalt and just about as thick. "How old is the coffee you have here?" I asked the woman who was standing behind the store counter.

She shrugged. "I don't know. I've only been working here two weeks."

Sign above the scale in a Mission Hills, Calif., doctor's office:

"Pretend it's your I.Q."

Doctors are used to getting calls at any hour. One night a man phoned, waking me up. "I'm sorry to bother you so late," he said, "but I think my wife has appendicitis."

Still half asleep, I reminded him that I had taken his wife's inflamed appendix out a couple of years before. "Whoever heard of a second appendix?" I asked.

"You may not have heard of a second appendix," he replied, "but surely you've heard of a second wife."

 

 

I'm a police officer and occasionally park my cruiser in residential areas to watch for speeders. One Sunday morning I was staked out in a driveway, when I saw a large dog trot up to my car. He stopped and sat just out of arm's reach. No matter how much I tried to coax him to come for a pat on the head, he refused to budge. After a while I decided to move to another location. I pulled out of the driveway, looked back and learned the reason for the dog's stubbornness. He quickly picked up the newspaper I had been parked on and dutifully ran back to his master.

 

 

Nothing seems to dim my 13-year-old son's sense of humor. And he's certainly not above being the butt of his own joke. Shortly after he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD), he threw this at me: "Hey Dad—how many ADD children does it take to change a light bulb?"

"I give up," I said.

"Let's go ride our bikes."

Rushing to get to the movies, my husband and I told the kids we had to leave "right now"—at which point our teenage daughter headed for the bathroom to apply makeup. Her dad yelled for her to get in the car immediately, and headed for the garage grumbling.

On the way to the multiplex my husband glanced in the rearview mirror and caught our teen applying lipstick and blush, which produced the predictable lecture. "Look at your mom," he said. "She didn't put on any makeup just to go sit in a dark movie theater."

From the back I heard, "Yeah, but Mom doesn't need makeup."

My heart swelling with the compliment, I turned back to thank this sweet, wonderful daughter of mine just as she continued, "Nobody looks at her."

 

 

My wife and I run a small restaurant where we often name our specials after our employees—dishes like "Chicken Mickey," after our dishwasher who gave us the recipe, and "Rod's Ribs," after a waiter who had his personal style of barbecue. One evening after rereading the menu, I broke with this tradition and changed the description of the special we had named after our chef. Despite her skills and excellent reputation, somehow I didn't think an entrée named "Salmon Ella" would go over big with our customers.  

Each year our company holds a training session in the conference room of the same hotel. When we were told we would not be able to reserve our usual location, my secretary, Gail, spent many hours on the phone trying to work out alternative arrangements. Finally, when the details were ironed out, she burst into my office.

"Great news, Scott!" she announced. "We're getting our regular room at the hotel!"

All eyes were on Gail and me as she suddenly realized she had interrupted a meeting with co-workers.

 

 

While I sat in the reception area of my doctor's office, a woman rolled an elderly man in a wheelchair into the room. As she went to the receptionist's desk, the man sat there, alone and silent. Just as I was thinking I should make small talk with him, a little boy slipped off his mother's lap and walked over to the wheelchair.

Placing his hand on the man's, he said, "I know how you feel. My mom makes me ride in the stroller too."

One of my friends, a musician, is always upbeat. Nothing gets her down. But when she developed ringing in one ear, I was concerned it might overwhelm even her. When I asked if her condition was especially annoying to a musician, she shook her head. "Not really," she said cheerfully. "The ringing sound is in the key of B flat, so I use it to tune my cello a half-tone lower."

 

 

I was reading to my wife a newspaper report of the speech in which FCC chairman Newton N. Minow called television "a vast wasteland."

If you watch your TV set constantly, Minow had said, "you will see a procession of game shows, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism …"

My 12-year-old son, hearing part of the quotation, interrupted excitedly, "What time does that show go on, Dad?"

I overheard my nine-year-old son on the phone with a friend discussing a computer simulation game. The game involved creating a family, a house for them to live in, and so on. My son, an old hand at the game, gave this warning: "Whatever you do, don't get kids. They don't bring in any money, and all they do is eat."

During a business trip to Boeing's Everett, Wash., factory, I noticed several 747 and 777 airliners being assembled. Before the engines were installed, huge weights were hung from the wings to keep the planes balanced. The solid-steel weights were bright yellow and marked "14,000 lbs." But what I found particularly interesting was some stenciling I discovered on the side of each weight. Imprinted there was the warning: "Remove before flight."    

Hospital regulations require a wheelchair for patients being discharged. However, while working as a student nurse, I found one elderly gentleman already dressed and sitting on the bed with a suitcase at his feet—who insisted he didn't need my help to leave the hospital. After a chat about rules being rules, he reluctantly let me wheel him to the elevator.

On the way down I asked if his wife was meeting him. "I don't know," he said. "She's still upstairs in the bathroom changing out of her hospital gown."

 

 

A helicopter was flying toward Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's navigation and communications equipment. Due to the extreme haze that day, the pilot now had no way of determining the course to the airport. All he could make out was a tall building nearby, so he moved closer to it, quickly wrote out a large sign reading "Where am I?" and held it in the chopper's window.

Responding quickly, the people in the building penned a large sign of their own. It read: "You are in a helicopter."
The pilot smiled, and within minutes he landed safely at the airport. After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked how the sign helped him determine their position.

"I knew it had to be the Microsoft building," the pilot replied, "because like any computer company's help staff, they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer."

 

 

The speaker at my bank's drive-through window had been broken for weeks, and we tellers had to resort to miming or writing notes to communicate with our frustrated customers. One day a sweet elderly lady whom I would see every week pulled up to the window, leaned out of her car and smacked the glass in front of my face. "Hope this is bulletproof," she yelled. There had just been a robbery at another bank nearby, so I was touched by her concern. "It is," I yelled back. "Good," she continued, "because someone is going to shoot you if you don't get that speaker fixed."  

My wife and I get along just great—except she's a back-seat driver second to none. On my way home from work one day, my cell phone rang as I merged onto a freeway bypass. It was my wife. By chance, she had entered the bypass right behind me.

"Honey," she said, "your turn signal is still on. And put your lights on—it's starting to rain."

 

 

I feel inadequate when talking with a mechanic, so when my vehicle started making a strange noise, I sought help from a friend. He drove the car around the block, listened carefully, then told me how to explain the difficulty when I took it in for repair. At the shop I proudly recited, "The timing is off, and there are premature detonations, which may damage the valves." As I smugly glanced over the mechanic's shoulder, I saw him write on his clipboard "Lady says it makes a funny noise."    

My husband, a computer-systems trouble-shooter, rode with me in my new car one afternoon. He had been working on a customer's computer all morning and was still tense from the session. When I stopped for a traffic light, I made sure to leave a safe distance from the stop line to keep oncoming drivers from hitting the car.

I couldn't help but laugh when my husband impatiently waved at me to move the car forward while saying, "Scroll up, honey."

 

 

My family has a tradition of naming the cruise control on our cars. We were used to hearing my father proclaim, "Take it, Max," as he flipped on the cruise control during long trips in our station wagon.

Recently, I was traveling with my parents in their new car when we hit a wide-open expanse of highway. My dad leaned back and said, "I think I'll let Tom drive for a while."

"Tom who?" I asked.

My mother translated for me: "Tom Cruise, of course."

 

 

The auto auction I attended was selling cars to benefit charity. Vehicles were classified as either "Running" or "No Start." On the block was a No Starter.

It had a shattered windshield, two missing tires, a sagging front bumper, a cockeyed grille, a hood that was sprung up at an angle, and dings and dents all over the body.

Before he started the bidding, the auctioneer announced the car's year, make and model, and then read the owner's comments: "Please note—the radio does not work."

 

 

 

Opening the box containing my new portable television, I removed the remote and turned it over to install the batteries. Molded into the device was this message:

"Made in Indonesia—Not Dishwasher Safe."

 

 

 

My 50-something friend Nancy and I decided to introduce her mother to the magic of the Internet. Our first move was to access the popular "Ask Jeeves" site, and we told her it could answer any question she had.

Nancy's mother was very skeptical until Nancy said, "It's true, Mom. Think of something to ask it."

As I sat with fingers poised over the keyboard, Nancy's mother thought a minute, then responded, "How is Aunt Helen feeling?"

 

 

Security and peace of mind were part of the reason we moved to a gated community. Both flew out the window the night I called a local pizza shop for a delivery. "I'd like to order a large pepperoni, please," I said, then gave him the address of our condominium. "We'll be there in about half an hour," the kid at the other end replied. "Your gate code is still 1238, right?"    

After shopping at a busy store, another woman and I happened to leave at the same time, only to be faced with the daunting task of finding our cars in the crowded parking lot. Just then my car horn beeped, and I was able to locate my vehicle easily. "Wow," the woman said. "I sure could use a gadget like that to help me find my car." "Actually," I replied, "that's my husband."  

My friend is notorious for waiting until the needle is on empty before filling his gas tank. Finally his car died on him, and we had to push it to the nearest filling station. After my friend finished pumping gas, the attendant asked if he had learned anything. "Yeah," my friend muttered, "I learned I have a 15-gallon tank."  

As an engineer in an upscale hotel, I was asked to repair or replace the television in a guest room. When I arrived, the couple was watching a picture one-third the size of the screen. I knew all our spare sets were in use, so I figured what the heck: I struck the side of the TV with the heel of my hand. The picture returned to full size.

"Look, honey," said the wife to her husband. "He went to the same repair school as you."

 

 

The computer in my high school classroom recently started acting up. After watching me struggle with it, one of my students took over. "Your hard drive crashed," he said.

I called the computer services office and explained, "My computer is down. The hard drive crashed."

"We can't just send people down on your say-so. How do you know that's the problem?"

"A student told me," I answered.

"We'll send someone over right away."

 

 

I realized the impact of computers on my young son one evening when there was a dramatic sunset. Pointing to the western sky, David said, "I wish we could click and save that."

 

 

I was with a friend in a café when a noisy car alarm interrupted our conversation. "What good are car alarms when no one pays any attention to them?" I wondered aloud.

"Some are quite effective," my friend corrected me. "Last summer, my teenager spent a lot of time at the neighbors'. Whenever I wanted him home, I'd go out to our driveway and jostle his car."

 

 

I recently bought a new car that had a faulty light. When, after five visits to the dealer's shop, they were unable to fix it, I tried to get it replaced by threatening to use my state's lemon laws. My calls and letters to the dealer got me nowhere.

I went to a florist, ordered a fruit basket filled with lemons and sent it to the dealer with this poem: 

"When I drive my lemon, I'll be thinking of you. 

Pretty soon, my attorney will too." 

A short time later the dealer called and asked what color I'd like my new car to be.

 

 

My husband works for a high-tech company that uses a sophisticated robotic mail-delivery system. The robot makes mail stops by following a clear painted line on the hallway floor. Recently the line had to be recharged by applying special paint. While it was drying, signs were posted warning, "Please don't step on the invisible line."

 

 

My sister Darlene has the courage—but not always the skills—to tackle any home-repair project. For example, in her garage are pieces of a lawn mower she once tried to fix. So I wasn't surprised the day my other sister, Jesse, and I found Darlene attacking her vacuum cleaner with a screwdriver. "I can't get this thing to cooperate," she explained. "Why don't you drag it out to the garage and show it the lawn mower?" Jesse suggested.    

 My wife was in her gynecologist's busy waiting room when a cell phone rang. A woman answered it, and for the next few minutes, she explained to her caller in intimate detail her symptoms and what she suspected might be wrong.

Suddenly the conversation shifted, and the woman said, "Him? That's over." Then she added, "Can we talk about this later? It's rather personal, and I'm in a room full of people."

 

 

I couldn't decide whether to go to Salt Lake City or Denver for vacation, so I called the airlines to get prices. "Airfare to Denver is $300," the cheery salesperson replied. "And what about Salt Lake City?" "We have a really great rate to Salt Lake—$99," she said "But there is a stopover." "Where?" "In Denver," she said.  

A pastor I know of uses a standard liturgy for funerals. To personalize each service, he enters a “find and replace” command into his word processor. The computer then finds the name of the deceased from the previous funeral and replaces it with the name of the deceased for the upcoming one.

Not long ago, the pastor told the computer to find the name “Mary” and replace it with “Edna.” The next morning, the funeral was going smoothly until the congregation intoned the Apostles’ Creed. “Jesus Christ,” they read from the preprinted program, “born of the Virgin Edna.”

 

Some New Yorkers were on a safari in the jungles of a little-explored faraway country when they were captured by cannibals.

"Oh, yes!" the chief of the tribe exclaimed. "We're going to put you all into big pots of water, cook you and eat you."

"You can't do that to me," the tour leader said. "I'm the editor of The New Yorker!"

"Well," he responded, "tonight you will be editor-in-chief!"

During a job interview, a client of my employment-search company voiced his concern about work-life balance.

"Spending time with my family is very important to me, and I'm just wondering how much overtime I can expect to put in," he asked. His prospective employer quickly put him at ease.

"Family should always come first," came the reply. "Of course, here we like our employees to think of us as family."

 

Because he's a chemist and I'm a personal trainer, my fiancé and I don't always agree about what eating healthy means. I prefer foods with less fat and fewer calories. He watches out for chemicals and additives. We were grocery shopping, and I asked him to go get some butter.

"Which kind," he asked, "cancer or heart attack?

 

The topic of the day at Army Airborne School was what you should do if your parachute malfunctions. We had just gotten to the part about reserve parachutes when another student raised his hand.

"If the main parachute malfunctions," he asked, "how long do we have to deploy the reserve?"

Looking the trooper square in the face, the instructor replied, "The rest of your life."

 

After my wife landed a coveted job offer from DHL, we went out of town to celebrate. While on our trip, she was contacted by the company's human resources department with an urgent request to complete and send back her tax forms.

"No problem," she said. "I'll FedEx them right over."

 

Q: Who invented copper wire?
A: Two tax attorneys fighting over a penny.

Unexpected guests were on the way, and my mother, an impeccable housekeeper, rushed around straightening up. She put my father and brother to work cleaning the guest bathroom. Later, when she went to inspect it, she was surprised that the once-cluttered room had been tidied up so quickly. Then she saw the note on the closed shower curtains. It read "Thank you for not looking in the bathtub."

"I feel sorry for this soldier," joked my husband as he handed me a flier he'd found in our mailbox. It read:

Lost Cat
Black and white
Answers to Nate
Belongs to a soldier
Recently neutered

As I stripped off my sweatshirt at the breakfast table one warm morning, my T-shirt started to come off too.

My husband let out a low whistle. I took it as a compliment until he said, from behind his newspaper, "Can you believe the price of bananas?"

A man and his wife were taking an afternoon drive through the countryside. They had just had a big argument and were not talking to one another. Finally the husband decided to break the silence and say something sarcastic to his wife: “Look at all the cows and pigs in the pasture. Don’t they remind you of your relatives?”

The wife replied, “Yes, they do. They remind me of my in-laws.”

Teeing off on the 12th hole at a golf resort, we stopped to buy cold drinks from the young woman driving the beverage cart. As my buddy reached for his wallet, he said to her, "You're in great shape. You must work out a lot."

Flattered, she gave him a big smile. "Thank you."

The next day a different young woman was driving the cart. "Watch this," I whispered. I walked up to her and said, "Wow, you must work out a lot."

"Yeah," she replied. "You should try it."

 

It was late in the afternoon, and I was putting the final burnishes on a piece of writing that I was feeling pretty good about. Yes, okay, it was an e-mail, but it was a clever one and I hated to lose it. My cursor had frozen. I tried to shut the computer down, and it seized up altogether. Unsure of what else to do, I yanked the battery out.

Unfortunately, Windows had been in the midst of a delicate and crucial undertaking. The next morning, when I turned my computer back on, it informed me that a file had been corrupted and Windows would not load. This was followed by some mysterious lines of code, which I took to be my computer saying "Serves you right, careless pea brain" in its native tongue. More graciously, it offered to repair itself by using the Windows Setup CD.

I opened the special drawer where I keep CDs that I have no intention of ever using. There was an IKEA how-to CD, which featured young Swedes assembling kitchen cabinets with nothing but a sardine can key and untrammeled wholesomeness. Mostly, there were CDs of music that my friends are always burning for me, unbidden, because they think I'll enjoy them.

But no Windows CD. I was forced to call the computer company's Global Support Center. My call was answered by a woman in some unnamed, far-off land. I find it vexing to make small talk with someone when I don't know what continent they're standing on. Suppose I were to comment on the beautiful weather we've been having when there was a monsoon at the other end of the phone? So I got right to the point.

"My computer is telling me a file is corrupted and it wants to fix itself, but I don't have the Windows Setup CD."

"So you're having a problem with your Windows Setup CD." She had apparently been dozing and, having come to just as the sentence ended, was attempting to cover for her inattention. I recognized the technique from a thousand breakfast conversations.

"We took that rug in weeks ago. Should I call the cleaners?"

"No, thanks. I'm good."

It quickly became clear that the woman was not a computer technician. Her job was to serve as a gatekeeper, a human shield for the techs, who were off in the back room, or possibly another far-off continent, playing cards and burning CDs for their friends. Her sole duty, as far as I could tell, was to raise global stress levels.

To make me disappear, the woman gave me the phone number for Windows' creator, Microsoft. This is like giving someone the phone number for, I don't know, North America. Besides, the CD worked; I just didn't have it. No matter how many times I repeated my story, we came back to the same place. She was unflappable and resolutely polite.

When my voice hit a certain decibel, I was passed along, like a hot, irritable potato, to a technician.

"You don't have the Windows Setup CD, ma'am, because you don't need it," he explained cheerfully. "Windows came preinstalled on your computer!"

"But I do need it."

"Yes, but you don't have it."

We went on like this for a while. Finally, he offered to walk me through the use of a different CD, one that would erase my entire system. "Of course, you'd lose all your e-mail, your documents, your photos." It was like offering to drop a safe on my head to cure my headache. "You might be able to recover them, but it would be expensive." He sounded delighted. "And it's not covered by the warranty!" The safe began to seem like a good idea, provided it was full.

I hung up the phone and drove my computer to a small, friendly repair place I'd heard about. A smart, helpful man dug out a Windows CD and told me it wouldn't be a problem. An hour later, he called to let me know it was ready. I thanked him, and we chatted about the weather, which was the same outside my window as it was outside his.

Though I have always been a sound sleeper, I am frequently up at 4 a.m. This is around the time that my husband, Ed, having woken up at 3, will generally crawl back into bed. Ed goes downstairs to watch TV so that his tossing and turning doesn't wake me up. This is very considerate, except that when he returns, he likes to chat about what he's been watching. The other night, Ed had been watching an infomercial for something called the Steam Shark. I have a distinct memory of surfacing from the depths of sleep directly into the sentence "You can steam-clean around the base of the toilet." Last night it was "Honey, Bo Schembechler died." Schembechler, Ed explained to my inert self, was a beloved University of Michigan football coach. There is little difference between talking to me about college football when I'm asleep and talking to me about it when I'm awake. Eyelid position, basically, is the difference. Ed kept going: "He was the voice of the Wolverines." I was partly awake at this point, and for some reason, the sentence struck me as the funniest thing I'd heard in a very long time. Different rules apply between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m., I find. Things that would ordinarily not even qualify as mildly amusing will often, at 3 a.m., strike the ear as high comedy. Worries are similarly warped. I recently spent the hour from 4 to 5 a.m. worrying about the placement of two shrubs we had planted in our yard that day. Ed came in from downstairs, and I unloaded my fears about the overly close positioning of the shrubbery. I made him promise that first thing the next day, we would dig one up and move it, lest they crowd each other's roots. In the morning, we went out to look at the plants. If anything, they looked a little lonesome there at 17 inches apart, just as the label had recommended. I am now known far and wide as the Nervous Gardener. Anyway, once the laughter sets in, we're both up. The topic of wolverines led to savage animals in general, and from there to a game called African Veldt. We frequently make up mindless games to wile away the time until the sandman agrees to take over the proceedings again. "First person to run out of animals is the loser," I said. Ed pointed out that since I had been to Africa, the game was rigged in my favor. He made me name three animals for every one of his. "Fine. Leopard, zebra, elephant." "Lion," said Ed with great confidence. "Warthog, wildebeest, springbok." A long time went by. The shrubbery roots were closing in upon each other. Finally, and with great hesitancy, Ed said, "Giraffe?" "Eland, gnu, ostrich." "You can't do birds." "Birds are animals." "Okay, ant," said Ed, and then he rolled over. He took his bottom pillow and put it on top of his head. This is known as the Ed sandwich: pillow, Ed's head, pillow. He does this because he can't sleep if there's noise in the room. There isn't now, but there will be. I make noises while I sleep, and Ed has had many hours to devote to cataloging them. Common varietals include the Click, the Tommy gun and the Darth Vader. Light is also a problem for my husband. There can be no light in the bedroom, not even the light from the digital clock, which is hidden away on the bottom shelf of Ed's nightstand, broadcasting the time to toddlers and gnomes. The room across the hall must also be dark. We can't just close our bedroom door to block the light from that room, because this will make the bedroom too stuffy for Ed to sleep. That room must also have its curtains drawn. If he could, Ed would draw the curtains on the windows of our neighbors across the driveway, and on down the street, all the way to the horizon.

There is a special room in hell where the flames are extra hot and you must sleep sitting straight up. The sign on the door says: Reserved for People Who Reclined Their Seatbacks the Entire Flight. Most of us understand the discomfort we are inflicting on the poor schmo behind us and try to limit our reclining for the lights-out portion of the flight. If everyone leans back together, in the manner of a synchronized, unattractively upholstered Esther Williams swim routine, then no one is unfairly crowded.

I had a seatback diva in front of me last week. We were barely airborne, and there she was in my lap. Using my computer would now entail making a slit in my belly flab and inserting the front half of the keyboard inside me, so that the bottom row of letters were rendered inaccessible and I would have to make do without the words banana, vixen, balaclava and many other colorful favorites.

Defeated, I tried to watch the little TV mounted in the seatback in front of me. Alas, the screen was so close to my face that my eyes were crossing. Emeril had become a set of perfectly choreographed twin Emerils, which was one or possibly two more Emerils than I could handle. In desperation, I turned to my complimentary copy of the Sky Mall catalog and began to read. A mail-order company was selling "the Most Compact Washing Machine in the World," enabling, I don't know, Keebler elves to do laundry in their tree. "Tiki Head Tissue Box Dispenses Tissue Through the Nose!" another ad reported excitedly.

"Who would buy this?" I said to the man in the middle seat, but he was busy waving down a flight attendant. "Miss?" He was holding up his knees. "Is there room in the overhead bin for these?"

We hit a pocket of turbulence and Bloody Mary mix slopped onto the chinos of the man next to me. I pointed to the Most Compact Washing Machine in the World. "You need this," I said. The man did not smile. His expression was just like the Tiki Head with tissues up its nostrils, displeased and clearly embarrassed about the situation yet resolutely stoic.

More and more, you must board a plane like a general going to war. You must constantly defend your turf -- your wee, airless kingdom. The occupier of the next seat will make his move upon your armrest the moment your vigilance flags. You will return from the bathroom to find an elbow planted in the little vinyl peninsula where your people once roamed free.

The battle for armrest dominance has grown ever more intense in the era of the laptop computer. The airplane seat -- designed to be a chair, and never very good at it -- has now been asked to perform double duty as an office. Soon people will be bringing fitness equipment and hobby craft aboard, and the company that makes the elfin washers will need to get started on looms and rowing machines.

Complex rules apply to the space beneath your seat, for it belongs, technically, to the person behind you. Not long ago, I was on a transcontinental flight when I was awakened by the woman behind me. "Excuse me?" She was holding a plastic juice cup. "Excuse me? This is coming in my section." I had put my empty cup under my seat and it had slid backward, crossing an imaginary line in the carpeting. She was peeved. Her eyes were squinty and her nostrils were flaring, as though about to dispense tissues through the nose.

People were staring, so I took the cup. Later that night, a pantyhosed foot made a stealth assault on the back of my right armrest. It was her: the Juice Cup Border Patrol.

"Excuse me?" I nudged the foot ungently. "This is coming in my section."

Several hours went by without incident. I was beginning to drift off, when I heard a driving, tinny noise: ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch ... The woman behind me had mobilized the most fearsome weapon in the modern airplane arsenal: the Overly Loud Headphones.

I waved my hot towel in surrender.

More than once I have had my brain paralyzed by what psychiatrists call Old House Delusion Disease (OHDD). My wife and I bought an old house that had every known old-house problem, including termites, not to mention a grand total of one closet, and an entire room that had no electrical outlets -- a clear indication that the house was not built by or for people with a need for, say, lighting. Were we discouraged?

No! We thought it was quaint!

Here's how delusional we were. We had plumbing problems (of course), and in an effort to fix a leak, some plumbing guys were crawling around under our house. They emerged holding some yellowed, crumbling, rolled-up newspapers, which they'd found wrapped around our pipes, apparently as insulation. We carefully unwrapped one of the newspapers and found that it was a Miami Herald from 1927. It had a story in it about Charles Lindbergh.

So there we were, confronted with stark evidence that our pipes, in addition to leaking, were very old. It's like being aboard a boat in the middle of the Pacific and discovering that not only were you sinking, but also your hull was made entirely of Triscuits.

How did we react to this horrible news? We were thrilled! Charles Lindbergh! It was so charming! The plumbers were also very excited, but in their case it was because they knew we would be putting all their children through Harvard.

Our House Delusion Disease is very powerful. Usually, when you buy an old house, you hire professional house inspectors. These inspectors are very thorough: They spend a whole day crawling around the house, and then they give you a detailed, written report, which says "Do not buy this house, you idiot!"

Not in so many words, of course. The report breaks the house down by major defects, then sub-defects. The house, according to the report, consists entirely of defects. You read the report, but because you have OHDD, none of it actually penetrates your brain, even when the inspector goes out of his way to warn you about serious problems:

INSPECTOR: I want to show you something in the living room ...

YOU: Don't you love that room? It has such character! The molding!

INSPECTOR: About the molding -- I wanted you to see this. (The inspector takes a screwdriver and taps it against the molding. The molding disappears in a smokelike puff of wood particles. Then a large part of the wall itself collapses, leaving a gaping hole, through which can be seen, in the gloom, an exposed wire that periodically emits a shower of sparks, illuminating a dripping pipe covered with green slime. A rat darts by, pursued by what seems to be a boa constrictor.)

YOU: Ha ha! These quirky old houses! That can be repaired, right?

INSPECTOR: Well, I suppose it could, if you're willing to ...

YOU: I'm not worried about cosmetic problems, as long as the house is structurally sound. (You stamp your foot on the floor to emphasize this point. Your foot goes through the floor.)

INSPECTOR: Um, that's another thing. Your floor joists have been almost entirely eaten away.

YOU: (retracting your foot) Termites? No biggie! A lot of these old houses have termites! We can just have it treated by ...

INSPECTOR: Actually, it's beavers. They're building a dam in the basement.

YOU: (silence)

INSPECTOR: I've never seen that before.

YOU: (recovering) Well, the kids have been wanting a pet!

At this point the inspector, who has dealt with OHDD before, gives up and edges out of the room, taking care not to put too much weight on any one part of the floor.

You, of course, buy the house. As a true OHDD victim, you would buy this house if it were on fire. Once it's yours, you begin calling what will become a never-ending parade of highly paid craftsmen, who will spend so much time at your house that eventually they will become a part of your family, and invite you to attend all their children's graduations from Harvard.

What timing! I'd just worn a hole through my llama wool sweater and used up the last of my patchouli-scented soap when I got the memo that "metrosexual" was out and "machosexual" was in. Women, it seems, have tired of men with hairless chests, so they've changed the rules, and the old macho is back in vogue. From now on, guys need to look and act tough -- at a minimum, tough enough to open jelly jars without having to run them under hot water.

Taking my marching orders, the first thing I did was to exhale for the first time in three years, letting my belly settle back into its natural position draped over my belt. I then canceled my membership in the Tiramisu-of-the-Month club.

Gone, too, was the easy sympathy I doled out to my three-year-old daughter after she pulled the head off her Polly Pocket doll for the 12th time. "Now it's a Marie Antoinette doll," I told Quinn, knowing that tough love was the best love. Gone was my simple acquiescence when my wife, Jennifer, informed me we'd be watching the Melissa Gilbert retrospective on Lifetime Television.

"Sorry," I told her, "this TV has been reserved for a special edition of 'Killing Cattle With Mike Ditka.' "

Part of the machosexual compact is to fulfill traditional male roles -- to be the rock, the decision-maker. So as commander-in-chief of our little tribe, I canceled our family trip to Hersheypark. "Machosexuals," I explained, "don't have chocolaty good times. We have adventures." But being a benevolent dictator, I presented an alternative.

"Who wants to go bareback rhino racing in Zimbabwe?" I asked.

Machosexuals are a patient lot, so when Jennifer said, "No, we're going to Hersheypark," I knew that perseverance was in order.

"Wanna take a steam bath in an active volcano in Indonesia?"

"No."

"Fly a MiG-29 at mach 3 over Moscow, going 60,000 feet straight up in the air at a 90-degree angle until the engine stalls and we tumble back to earth in a free fall, coming just ten feet off the ground before pulling up?"

"No."

"Kayak down Victoria Falls? Go skinny-dipping in the Arctic? Walk over to the mini-mart and eat five-day-old sushi?"

No, no and no.

"You don't like to have fun, do you?"

Click! Jennifer turned on the TV and raised the volume until Melissa Gilbert's voice drowned mine out.

Then, after much wrestling over the remote, we agreed that I should be kicked out of the house.

So off I stomped to the nearest watering hole to be with my fellow bulls. I was glad to see everyone had read the same memo as me. Gone were the cosmopolitans and chocolate martinis. In their place was only one choice: "Barkeep," I said, "gimme a Milwaukee's Best!" A cold, frothy one appeared before me.

There was backslapping, swearing and a quick debate on wearing helmets while motorcycling (everyone was against it). And we used the old bar food favorite, edamame beans, to throw at a poster of Brad Pitt.

After raising a glass to the machosexuals of yore -- Bogie, Duke Wayne, Attila the Hun -- we took out our knives and whittled some sticks before calling it a night. Back home, I snuck into the house to avoid Jennifer. We machosexuals pick our battles and in so doing know that tiptoeing is not the same as retreating.

In the living room I found Quinn crying over her headless doll as Jennifer struggled with duct tape.

I grabbed some glue, and Jennifer handed me the doll. I reattached the head as best I could. It slipped a bit before drying, giving it that cock-eyed, self-assured look that's so attractive in a plastic doll. Quinn climbed into my lap, and the three of us played with her Polly Pockets.

Who knew playing with dolls could be so much fun?

I've suddenly become nostalgic for my old one-room, half-bath, 12-story walk-up in the city's hovel district. Let me explain.

It all started simply enough. Soon after we moved to the country, my wife, Jennifer, decided that our backyard was sorely in need of some landscaping work.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked. "Look at how fat and sassy our grass is. I bet we have the fattest, sassiest lawn in the neighborhood."

That's when Jennifer let me in on a little secret. There is no grass on our lawn. Only fat, sassy poison ivy.

I pointed out that unlike everything else in the yard, the ivy was thriving and maybe we should go after something else, like that malingering rosebush.

"Why evict the one thing that actually wants to be here?" I reasoned.

Here's why: Jennifer doesn't like poison ivy. Something about the word poison makes her think it can't be good for you.

So we called in landscapers to get estimates. The first took one look at our lawn, then called his car dealer and ordered a BMW, the one that comes with a chauffeur. The second charged by the blade of grass. That's when I drove into town looking for one of those cheap illegal aliens the media insists is on every street corner in America.

"Are you an illegal alien?" I asked the first man I saw.

"No, I'm the mayor," he said.

"Are you an illegal alien?" I asked another.

"No, I'm your neighbor."

"Are you an illegal alien?"

"No, I'm your wife, you idiot," said Jennifer, shoving a rake in my hand and telling me to take care of things myself.

One of the problems with poison ivy is you can't simply grab it by the collar and toss it out like some drunk from a bar. You have to suit up for battle -- rubber gloves duct-taped to a long-sleeved shirt buttoned to your neck. Long pants with the cuffs duct-taped over your socks and work boots. A scarf wrapped tightly around neck and face, duct-taped to goggles and hat, completes the jackass look. Armed with pruner and weedkiller, I was no longer simply a homeowner unable to find an illegal alien to do the work he didn't want to do. I was, in fact, a Knight of the Backyard Realm.

Since I had no idea what poison ivy looked like, I kept my plan of attack simple: Anything remotely planty goes. Ferns? Gone! Hosta? Gone! Rosebush? Gone! Trees? Gone! Mailbox? Gone! I was Sherman marching on Atlanta, laying waste to anything in my path. What the weedkiller didn't get, I ripped out by hand. What I couldn't rip out, I ran over with my car.

"That's the Japanese maple!" screamed Jennifer.

"Now it's mulch," I said, grinning devilishly over the whirring engine of my '95 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

By the end of the day, I'd rid the yard of all the poison ivy save for one sorry little clump. Like the heads of the vanquished left on spikes outside medieval castle walls, it served as a warning to any of its kin that might dare to show their three shiny leaves around here.

Hot and tired, and feeling pretty damn good about myself, I unraveled the four rolls of duct tape that had adhered to my body and stepped out of my sweat-soaked clothes, 27 pounds lighter than when I entered them. The shrieks of horror from my 78-year-old neighbor spying my near-naked body startled me so, that I tripped down a small embankment -- only to be saved by the soft, pillowy embrace of the remaining clump of poison ivy.

As I bathed in calamine lotion, Jennifer figured out that all my tireless work had reduced our home's value by a third. So she hired one of the landscapers to return the yard to its previous state of disrepair. We went with the guy who charged by the blade of grass. With no lawn left, how expensive could it be?

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Exchange your shivers for some giggles as we celebrate the spring season with some of our silliest reader submissions: Stop and Smell the Softener I had spent the late winter months waiting impatiently for signs of spring. When the first warm, sunny Saturday arrived, I eagerly unlocked the storm door and stepped onto our patio deck. I was pleased by the sight of green sprouts and the sounds of singing birds. More than anything else, I delighted in the sweet aroma of the spring air. Knocking on the kitchen window, I beckoned to my wife to join me in enjoying the pleasures of the season. She quietly brought me back to earth when she reminded me that I was standing over the dryer vent, inhaling the scent of fabric softener. -- Contributed by George G. Busher Your Sunday Best Our daughter, an ROTC cadet, was ordered to Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania for field exercises. Since it was the Easter season, she requested permission to attend church services on Palm Sunday. The troops were in the field at the time, so the commanding officer agreed only if there happened to be a church in the vicinity of their maneuvers. When a small country church was seen along the road, our daughter entered quietly, hoping to be unnoticed in spite of her leaf-and-branch camouflage. But all eyes turned upon her as a small child cried in amazement, "Look, somebody came as a palm!" -- Contributed by Elizabeth Marvin Spring Fever One spring day I was taking the roll in my secretarial class at our local technical college. One of the sun worshipers was absent. "Cindy won't be here this afternoon?" I asked. "She went home to lay in the sun," a young woman in the front row answered. Trying to correct her grammar without embarrassing her before the class, I whispered, "Lie." Okay," she replied in astonishment. "Cindy got sick and went home." -- Contributed by Mary T. Upton Standby, Soldier Every Easter our church stages an elaborate pageant. Last year the man who played Pontius Pilate had to work on the night of the dress rehearsal, and a chorus member substituted for him. As we began rehearsing Pilate's solo, the conductor stopped the orchestra. "Pilate, I don't hear you," he called out. "You're not loud enough." "Pilate is at work," a voice on the stage shouted back. "We've got our co-Pilate tonight." -- Contributed by Bill Dyson Signs of Spring In Ohio, spring is always eagerly awaited after the long, cold winters. When I arrived at work one day in mid-March, I noticed a sign gaily decorated with flowers and butterflies. It read: "Think Spring." The first day of spring blew in with a snowstorm and freezing temperatures, however, and another flowery sign was posted. This time the message read: "Forget Spring. Think Summer." -- Contributed by Rita Milios Sleepless Saving Time Twice a year, we change the clocks for daylight-savings time. And twice a year, my normally punctual assistant arrives late to work the Monday after we do so. I finally had to find out why. "Do you have a problem remembering to spring forward or fall back?" I asked. "Oh, no," she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. "What gets to me is staying up until 2 a.m. to change my clock." -- Contributed by Nancy M. Payne

The whole spa concept is foreign to me. I don't cleanse my face; I wash it. I don't "release toxins" or parole them or give them time off for good behavior. Even the word "spa" is strange, like the back end of it got left off. Like someone was writing, "I'm off to the spay and neuter clinic," but they collapsed in midsentence, the dog heaving a sigh of relief.

I have set all this aside, however, because I recently got a gift certificate for a local spa and have cajoled my friend Wendy into coming with me for a massage. We are now standing in the room known to ordinary (non-cleansing) people as a locker room. The sign on the door says "Women's Dressing." As though we are salads. Across the hall is the Water Closet. This spa has tried hard to be tony and European, right down to the medical background forms, which request that we "tick" boxes, rather than check them.

The locker room is pristine, and smells like no locker room I've ever been in. The smell turns out to be the lockers themselves: They're lined with cedar. "Check, I mean tick, this out," I tell Wendy. "In case moths attack while we're off getting our massages."

A beautiful young attendant arrives to show us how to operate the locks on the lockers. Then she leaves to get us bathrobes and towels.

Wendy looks stressed. "Do we have to tip her for this? I hate these places. I don't know how to behave. What do I tip? Do I take everything off? Do I leave on my underwear?" Wendy is going to need a second massage to relieve the stress that's accumulated while being here for the first one.

We are told to wait for our masseuses in the lounge. It's a gorgeous, perfect lounge with expensive cheeses and orchids and pitchers of lemon water. We pour ourselves some water and finish our medical forms. Wendy is reading aloud: "Are you pregnant? Ha! No, I just look like it!"

A different beautiful young attendant comes into the lounge to refill the water pitcher and clear away the empty glasses. She glances briefly at the flabby, wrinkly things on the sofa, as if giving thought to how she might clear those away too.

At last our masseuses arrive to take us to the treatment rooms. I watch Wendy disappear down the hallway, her voice trailing off: "I left my underwear on. Was that bad? I wasn't sure..."

My masseur, Leo, tells me to "disrobe to my level of comfort" and get under the sheet on the massage table. Then he leaves the room. I notice that a small pink flower is lying on the sheet at the head of the massage table, as though the last person was a shrub. The massage table is outfitted at one end with a small, heavily padded toilet seat. When he returns, Leo tells me to put my face inside the toilet seat, which he calls a "face cradle."

Leo says he'll be "opening up my muscles" and "getting blood into the area." This doesn't sound relaxing. It sounds like the tiger scene in Gladiator. I bury my face in the toilet and pray for leniency.

Eventually I relax. Things are going swell. Then Leo asks me if I want the "complimentary parafango treatment." There are so many things I need to learn before I can answer this question.

"Fango means volcanic," Leo adds, bringing me no closer to a decision.

"Oh," I say. "In what language?"

He doesn't answer. He must think I'm testing him. For the next few minutes, Leo gives me the complimentary silent treatment. This is fine with me. In my experience, conversations in which one party has her head in the toilet bowl are always trying.

I find Wendy waiting for me in the lounge. She got the parafango treatment on her feet. "And how was that?" I ask her.

"Really relaxing," she says in a strangled voice that I have heard her use only once before, when raccoons got into the compost. "Can we go now?" Wendy gets up and moves toward the door very fast, faster than you would expect for someone whose feet have been dipped in molten magma.