“You need two scales to weigh a scale.”

- George Carlin

Today, let's do a little exercise. Let's all take a few steps back and really look at the world around us.

Now, let me ask you, am I wrong in the observation that everything is starting to become far too complicated? It seems that there is a fine line between convenience and confusion, and I'm thinking we crossed that threshold a while ago and aren't turning back any time soon.

And this theory isn't exactly sudden for me, I've been thinking this for a while. For instance, when I was a kid in the Boy Scouts, I was given a Swiss Army knife as a gift. It had a knife, of course, a spoon, a screwdriver, and, for some reason, a corkscrew. Why, I never really knew, but, perhaps they thought we would enjoy a nice merlot as we tried to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Your guess is as good as mine. In a nutshell, there were a few accessories that were a bit unnecessary.

What I'm getting at is that my modern gadgets that are supposed to actually help improve my life and make living easier are somehow creating more stress than what I had before.

I'll start with the obvious: my cell phone.

At first we needed a way to talk to one another over long distances, so Alex Bell came up with the idea of the telephone. It rang, you picked up, and sat on the couch and talked. Pretty straightforward huh?

A few years later we wanted to not only talk on the phone but walk around the house too because, lets face it, sitting still is too much for most people to handle. So, now enters the dawn of the cordless.

In the meantime while we were getting used to chit chatting around the house in our underwear someone got the idea that the busy signal was a nuisance; so then came call waiting. Now we could quickly switch back and forth from conversation to conversation while simultaneously walking around the house in our underwear.

Was that good enough? Heck no, because some folks wanted to not only talk to two people at the same time but, they wanted to put on pants as well and continue the conversation in the produce aisle of the grocery store.

So where does this leave us? A hand-held flip-out piece of vibrating plastic that can send e-mails, confirm my global position, and if I want, I can talk to my friends, that is, if they aren't too busy taking photos with phones of their own.

And it doesn't stop with phones, either. It's as though everything is having an identity crisis. My coffee maker tells me the time. My watch tells me the date. And my date, well, she tells me to put the lid down.

See what I mean? Life's complicated!

Auburn native Bradley Molloy's column appears here, each

Sunday, in The Citizen. He can be reached at

lovonian@hotmail.com