Signs Technology Took Over Your Life

- Your stationery is more cluttered than Warren Beatty's address book. The letterhead lists a fax number, e-mail addresses for two on-line services, and your Internet address, which spreads across the breadth of the letterhead and continues to the back. In essence, you have conceded that the first page of any letter you write is letterhead.

- You have never sat through an entire movie without having at least one device on your body beep or buzz.

- You need to fill out a form that must be typewritten, but you can't because there isn't one typewriter in your house, only computers with laser printers.

- You think of the gadgets in your office as "friends," but you forget to send your father a birthday card.

- You disdain people who use low baud rates.

- When you go into a computer store, you eavesdrop on a salesperson talking with customers, and you butt in to correct him and spend the next twenty minutes answering the customers' questions, while the salesperson stands by silently, nodding his head.

- You use the phrase "digital compression" in a conversation without thinking how strange your mouth feels when you say it.

- You constantly find yourself in groups of people to whom you say the phrase "digital compression." Everyone understands what you mean, and you are not surprised or disappointed that you don't have to explain it.