I have it on good authority that the furnace repairman will be at my house sometime between the hours of five a.m. and midnight today.

Whether you're dealing with a willful teen or a reluctant machine, the approach is the same – repeatedly flick the reset switch. Except that teens don't have reset switches and the ones on machines appear to be mostly decorative.

Having exhausted my entire repertoire of furnace repair techniques, I broke down and decided I had to call the furnace repairman...

My children and I live in different time zones. They live in Teenage Standard Time and I live in the real world.

In the real world, deadlines have mass and momentum and cannot be ignored. Whenever I get a new deadline it starts making a sound like the music from the documentary film Jaws in which unsuspecting swimmers were viciously attacked by a great white cello player.

Take the annual United States Tax Day deadline. Every year on April fifteenth, I'm required to file a an extensive set of documents and a distressingly large check with the Internal Revenue Service. (Historical aside: The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 and I think it's fitting that America commemorates this tragic event by soaking the rich...)

I'm worried about my wife's memory. Just last week she forgot a key ingredient for dinner.

I found her standing in the kitchen, staring into the pantry with a look of intense concentration; the kind of look you associate with a sage pondering the nature of the universe or someone trying to figure out how best to ask a favor.

"Bother," she muttered.

Seeing no reasonable escape, I took the bait asked what was wrong.

"I thought we had some spaghetti sauce," she said.

You see what I mean about her memory? Taking pity, I offered to go to the store.

"So long as you're going anyway..." she said. "Could you pick up a French Loaf and some of those ... whatdyacallits for salad ... crunchy-bready things."

"Croutons?"

"Yeah. Here I'll write you a list."

I refused. It's her memory that's a problem, not mine...

Next week I have to take a personality test at work and I'm a little worried. What if it comes up negative?

Will I be summoned to the HR office where I will be forcibly enrolled in some flashy, pricey character-building exercise like a Dale Carnegie seminar, a ropes course, or graduate school? I kind of like the personality I have, it's everyone else who needs to change.

Especially the machines around me.

Really.

The gee-whiz-won't-the-world-of-tomorrow-be-great crowd can't wait for machines that have human-like personalities all their own. From what I can see, my machines already have too much personality.

Take my cars, for example. I drive a a piece of Detroit iron, American-made with a personality to match. It's loud, abrasive, and completely in-your-face. If I leave the headlights on, it rewards me with a sharp, sustained buzzzzzz; the automotive equivalent of "Hey mac, what do you think you're doing?"...

This past Christmas my wife gave me a supremely "guy" toy. She did this because, after twenty-two years of marriage, she's given up any hope of ever curing me of my essential guyness.

Early in our relationship she thought she had an outside chance of knocking the rough edges off me. She thought this because I wasn't exactly a fan of organized sports; football had more rules than any one game needed, baseball was less interesting than its scandals, and basketball and soccer seemed like too much work.

Despite my lack of the sports-appreciation gene, my wife found she couldn't really civilize me.

Her one attempt to help me get in touch with my feminine side resulted in a restraining order which requires me to stay at least fifty yards away from my feminine side at all times.

So I'm a guy and to honor that fact my wife gave me a guy toy for Christmas; a self-taught course in miniature helicopter repair.