Mother Nature has made these past few weeks difficult for people all over the country. This essay, from my recent book, is a reminder that now’s a good time to step back, take a breath, and remember the good old days when all we had to worry about was being screwed by technology.

Pick the one that doesn’t belong: skydiving without a parachute; botulism poisoning; home repair.

Right. It’s home repair.

All three are painful, but if you’re lucky the first two will kill you before you suffer too much.

Now, however, a local home improvement warehouse (I can’t mention the name but you would immediately recognize it, mainly because it’s printed on everybody’s orange aprons) has found a way to spare us men the agony of home repair.

All we need to do is take our wives shopping with us and make sure we pay in the self-service checkout line.

This amazing advance in retail science is a way for highly-placed corporate executives to assure other highly-placed corporate executives that their company is a happening, high-tech, cutting-edge business that sells exciting products like claw hammers, whose designs haven’t changed since the invention of hair.

The self-service checkout line contains an incredible machine that actually speaks to you in a cheery machine voice, greeting you with a friendly, “Please scan an item.” This is a simple request that merely requires you find the bar code on the item you want to buy. There is a trick to this. Find the most inaccessible location on the item and the bar code will be nearby. It will not be in the least accessible spot because that would be too easy.

I suggest searching for a place that looks like the bar code was originally floating in mid-air and then the product was assembled around it. Usually this will take less than ten minutes, though it could be longer if there is a line forming behind you.

(In this case you must remain calm. Panicking will only make your search more difficult. Regardless of what the people in line say, it is highly unlikely they are experts in genealogy or reproductive science.)

If you are lucky enough to find the bar code remember it is designed to be scanned forwards, backwards or at just about any angle. However, the slightest bit of dirt will cause the scanning process to fail. One would think that with our amazing advances in technology, this would not happen. What is amazing, though, is the dirt can be anywhere. If your neighbor’s dog has dirty paws, it’s going to be a long afternoon.

Do not become frustrated.

Eventually, the self-service checkout machine will direct you to an assistant, whom you may recognize as a real person. The assistant is not there to assist you. The assistant is there to assist the machine. The big corporate executives understand this. They have invested millions of dollars in these machines and they want the machines to last a lifetime. You, on the other hand, are only a customer who, at this point, the corporation may never see again.

The assistant will use the intercom to request a price check and then enter the price into his or her cash register. In the world of high-tech retailing, this replacement of a human by a machine plus a human is what high-tech executives call “efficiency.”

Now the machine will ask you to “Place item in the plastic bag.” There is a plastic bag in front of you. DO NOT PLACE THE ITEM IN THIS BAG. This bag is there just to give the machine another chance to show off its speaking skills. If you place anything in the bag the machine will tell you either “Too heavy an item in the bag,” “Unexpected item in the bag,” or my favorite “Place item in the plastic bag.“If you place the item anywhere but in the plastic bag, however, the machine will say, “Unexpected item in shopping area.”

With luck, your wife has begun murmuring.

The assistant, however, will find a place for your item. This is usually in your shopping cart. Strangely, this is the last place the machine expects your item to wind up. It will not seem strange to you, however, since it now appears you will not be celebrating your next birthday in the checkout line.

If your wife is as understanding as mine, she will never want to come back again. You will be able to shop alone, disappear into a bar, have a few brewskis, return empty-handed and she will never ask why.

Meanwhile, those highly-placed corporate executives will beam with pride and congratulate themselves in memos chiseled into stone tablets.

(From my recent book, I Don’t Have All the Answers Only Because There are Too Many Questions, available through Amazon.com. But, if you subscribe to the blog, you get this essay…and all the others in the book, for free. It’s what scientists who study such things call a “no-brainer.”)