Technology does not like me. Any machine I get close to recoils in terror. And upon my touch it often refuses to work.

Coffee makers are a prime example. I have gone through countless coffee makers over the years. My friends find it hilarious that my coffee makers will take several hours to make a pot before they finally go ka-put.

It all started back in 1989 when I was a sophomore at Ball State. It was morning and I was typing a paper in the Bell Building. The paper was for my Sport Sociology class which met at 11:00 A.M. I was particularly proud of this paper. It was on Joe Louis' military service. I had researched it thoroughly. And the great thing was that I was directly opposing some of the professor's viewpoints from his Joe Louis lecture earlier in the semester,

My old buddy Mart Ruusma and his girlfriend came into the computer room. (they were also in the Sport Soc. class.) They wanted me to go to breakfast with them. I told them that I was almost finished typing. Then it happened. Mart's girlfriend pulled a disk-shaped object from her backpack and said, "You can save it on this." I protested vigorously. I think that my first thought was "There is no way that my whole paper can be jammed into that little disk." I also was terrified of walking around with that thing, then sticking it into the computer machine to print it out later. I eventually conceded. She pushed the disk into the computer, did some typing, got it out, and we went to breakfast.

When we went back to the computer room, we discovered that half of my paper as gone. My lack of faith in the disk was confirmed. So I typed furiously then turned in my paper as the class ended.

I was given a DVD machine this past Christmas. It works for everyone but me. Incidentally, my editor Alan Hague was on the ground floor of developing DVD for RCA. Perhaps he can come over and conduct a therapeutic intervention between me and the movie machine he helped to create.