How to Tell You are Living in the Modern Age

1. You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.

2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

3. You call your son's beeper to let him know it's time to eat. He emails you back from his bedroom, "What's for dinner?"

4. Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her web site.

5 You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken with your next door neighbor yet this year.

6. You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains Echinacea.

7. Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.

8. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.

9. Every commercial on television has a web-site address at the bottom of the screen.

10. You buy a computer and 6 months later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.

11. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 years of your life, is cause for panic and turning around to go get it.

12. Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and take planning.

13. Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.

14. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have e-mail addresses.

15. You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.

16. Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.

17. Your idea of being organized is multiple-colored Post-it notes.

18. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.

19. You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.

20. You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

21. You get up in morning and go online before getting your coffee.

22. You wake up at 2am to go to the bathroom and check your E-mail on your way back to bed.

23. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)

24. You now think of three espressos as "getting wasted."

25. You haven't played solitaire with a real deck of cards in years.

26. You didn't give your valentine a card this year, but you posted one for your email buddies via a Web page.

27. You're reading this.

28. Even worse; you're going to forward it to someone else.  :-)