A friend of mine sent me a funny email recently.  His computer crashed.  He has a wedding coming up for his daughter.  Orders are piling up at work.

Without electronic connection and all those stored files, he’s at a loss on how to play catch up.  “What did we do back in the 1980s?,” he wrote, tongue in cheek (or totally seriously).  Indeed.

Most of us who use modern information infrastructure can relate to his dilemma.  You’re working on something, typing furiously, then a thunderbolt hits down the block, and poof, your power goes out.  And you didn’t backup the document, so it disappeared.  You curse.  You wait five hours for the electricity to go back on, and when it does, your computer screen flashes at you like it has something else in store rather than returning you to safe terrain.

Way, way back in the 1980s, I was a journalist and we used floppy disks to save our stories.  We got a momentary flicker from the electric grid one afternoon as I was into page 7 of an incredibly complex, research-heavy, quote-intense story.  Bye,bye words.  They fluttered out the window, along with my sanity.

The lesson was learned and from then on, I repeatedly stored what I wrote every few paragraphs or so.  That’s still a good lesson, but it doesn’t help today if your laptop crashes or your desktop goes on the fritz.  You’re back in the dark ages, wondering how to legibly put a pen to paper.

Unexpected events like this raise the stress level.  It’s the unpredictability that drives you batty.  If you knew it was coming, you would have been prepared and at least could plan some other way to communicate.  Isn’t that what smart phones are for?

When your information disappears offline, regardless of the reason, you are stranded.  First, you flounder.  It seems kind of cool.  “Man, I don’t have to do anything now.”

That rapidly morphs into, “I’m bored, I want something to do.”  Then you start thinking about how much you are tied to the Internet, electricity and data.  What you read needs those sources.  Many of the games you play are reliant on that infrastructure.  It’s the system that delivers your work.

After boredom, you start to reminisce, “I remember the in-box back in 1984.  My mail would pile up two feet high within days and I’d have to spend hours opening envelopes and scanning the headlines to see if any of the press releases sent to our publication were worth a piece of dog meat.”

We still saved stuff.  It was just more time and resource intensive.  Things got filed away into cardboard folders, not electronic ones. 

You didn’t click on Spellcheck.  Your copy editor had to fine-tooth-comb your copy to fix errors, and then the typist had to correct them manually.

You used carbon paper to type in triplicate.  To get rid of errors on mailed correspondence or memos, white-out was deployed – milky and messy.

You placed phone calls, talked to live operators who took messages. You called into your office to check to see who called, then actually called people back. Egads, what were we thinking?

There were in-boxes and out-boxes to manage.  Handwriting was in vogue.  When people talked, you took notes instead of ignoring the speaker and texting someone else a smiley face.

If you cleaned up all your paperwork, you might even socialize with your coworkers, tell a joke or relate a story.  That’s a thought worth saving for your next computer crash.

Our family has two dogs.  One is about a year old and the other a year or so older.  In their minds, they are still puppies.

That means they chew the heck out of things, particularly our part-black Lab Thor.  He maniacally grabs every fake little animal we throw his way, shaking it with his head, jaw clenched around it, grinning, like it’s some grand show.  Which it is to him.

To us though, it presents another problem, something not in my job description.  Once he shreds, rips, tears each of these toy little beasts apart, the insides bleed across our backyard where he has happily romped with it. 

If you’ve never had dogs or don’t purchase these chew toys, you may not know that they bleed this white fluffy stuff when their insides spill out.  Thor gobbles them chunk by chunk, and as he depletes the body shell of each fake animal, he spits out balls of finely-spun white material that probably is petroleum-based and doesn’t degrade in the environment.

Wind then picks them up, blows them against our fence, under bushes, wedges them into mulch or the side lot next door.  As Thor and Pepper (our other dog, who also contributes to this mess) devastate every one of these gifts we bring them, I trail along, picking up the remnants.

You don’t realize you’ve signed up for this duty when you bring dogs into your household.  Like many other things in life, the reality of something isn’t quite what your fantasy world envisioned.  We head down paths not considering all the consequences.

Pets, in general, pose a lot of issues that we don’t think about beforehand.  In addition to shredded white fluffy material blowing around your backyard, there is the other big one that many don’t think of before they bring a dog home:  Cleaning up after the hound.

That means picking up and throwing away everything he has chewed apart.  It also means the deposits he leaves after processing the carbon he ingests.  Yes, we are talking about the dreaded dog poop.  It never ends.

If you let it go for too long, your yard is covered and you can’t keep your shoes clean while tip-toeing through the grass.  Wrap the plastic bag around your hand for protection, grab the mounds, drop them into the other plastic bag and move on to find the next surprise.

Really, it’s not that bad.  It’s just something you have to do.  But you don’t always think before you get the dog:  “That’s gonna be in my home job description for the next 14 years.”  Doing it often enough, you become an expert “Dog Poop Picker Upper.”  You may not put it on your resume or LinkedIn profile, but you achieve elite level status after years of experience.

You recognize what you didn’t sign up for after you’ve actually signed up – like buying a house (and not realizing all the shrubs that need regular trimming) or taking a job (“and OMG, the commute is twice as long as my previous job”) or agreeing to volunteer (and suddenly you have a pile of papers to summarize and put together a proposal on something you know nothing about). 

Figure it out beforehand.  That’s the key.  Look at the change from multiple angles and consider the unintended consequences.  If we had officials in high places analyzing the world’s issues along these lines, we’d be in a lot better position to solve complex problems.  And maybe we’d figure out a more environmentally-friendly stuffing to put in those dog chew toys.

Imagine this:  Someone wants to pay you big bucks to endorse their product.  Would you?

Would it depend on the product?   What parameters would you establish before you’d do it?  How much money would you seek to stand in front of a camera beamed to millions of television sets, exhorting the wonderful characteristics of some object?

It’s an intriguing exercise to undertake.  First, you have to consider the things you use in your life, and which ones really stand out.  Do you just buy products, or are some of them exceptional?  Which stand out?

We go through our days using all kinds of stuff and not thinking about it.  Grab the breakfast cereal.  Inhale it without tasting it.  Brush our teeth.  What toothpaste did we get the last time?  Hmmm, can’t remember.

Drink some coffee.  Do you have a favorite brand?  If so, this might be something worth considering endorsing.  It peps you up for the day.  You could talk about how it revs your engine.  It tastes good.  Slurp, slurp, smack, smack.

Then there’s the car.  Do you really like your car?  Or is it just some inanimate object used to get you from here to there?  Are there specific qualities about a car that you want or like?

We can continue to pose more questions along these lines.  But the biggie is:  Why do the celebrities who get paid to endorse companies/products/services make the choices they do?

Blake Griffin, for example, who plays for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, endorses the car manufacturer Kia, and has done so for several years.  He’s gets to play a goofy role with some funny lines.  Maybe that’s what he wanted to do, and he gets a lot of $$$$ to do that, but was it the laughs he wanted to generate, the money involved, or something else that led to his endorsement?

Similarly, super model Kate Upton now prances for “Game of Thrones.”  It seems every time you turn on an app on your smart phone, she pops up in gear that advances her physical qualities.  Does she play “Game of Thrones?”  I’d like to actually ask her that, but presume the answer would be “no.”  So she pitches the game for the money and visibility.  She’s building her personal brand.

Then there’s Kevin Durant with the NBA’s Oklahoma Thunder.  He’s pitching a whole bunch of stuff, which I no longer remember.  But I like Kevin Durant.  So if I see the ads again, I might think harder about buying the products he’s pitching.  Still, he doesn’t need the money or the exposure, so did he make his picks because he’s emotionally invested in each product, or did he just follow his agent’s advice?

Take this drill:  What would you endorse based on your experience with the product?  I queried multiple people with this.  Two of them immediately said, “Advil.”  And I know a third person who if asked that question, would also say Advil, because he calls it the miracle drug.  Score one for them.

When I self-administered the test, my responses were the Toyota Prius, “5” gum and Jersey Mike’s sub shops.  We’ve owned two Prius’s – they’re reliable and average over 51 miles per gallon.  That’s happiness and they cut exhaust emissions by over 50%.

“5” Gum is flavorful, pliant, lasts long.  We buy it by the carton. 

Jersey Mike’s has fresh and tasty bread, loads you up on meat they slice in front of you (none of that pre-packaged stuff where they peel the cellophane or paper off to plop it on your roll), then they top it off with massive amounts of your favorite extras.  Yum.  I want to go right now.

Put me on TV.  I’ll shout out for those three.  With sincerity.

There’s a new TV show on Sunday nights – “American Odyssey” on NBC.  With multiple plot lines, and a conspiracy at its heart, it’s compelling television.

Like all TV, you have to suspend belief in parts of it.  Given how interesting the show is though, it’s sad that they don’t inject a bit more reality into scenes that could easily use them.

In one of the recent episodes, for example, the main character gets into a fight.  Odelle is attacked by mercenaries, and she fights them off with chops, kicks, flips and punches.  I can buy that – she’s U.S. military-trained and knows how to handle herself physically.

It stretches the bounds of belief afterwards.  Odelle gets pounded in the back with a weapon.  That knocks her down into the desert dust.  She and her traveling companion get saved from the mercenaries by a character who has tracked them.

I’m still with it until this point.  What I don’t get is how she hops into this modified jeep-pickup and it’s like nothing ever happened.  She doesn’t hold her back in pain.  No grimacing.  She does walk like she’s just been beat up.

Get the crap beat out of you, dust yourself off and move on.  I get it.  It’s TV (or the movies).  We all have to play pretend make-believe.  There’s not a single show you can watch without accepting certain premises.  Otherwise you’d never buy the story.

Still, can we please get a bit more reality?  In this case, you could have Odelle create a makeshift wrap of some kind to cinch around her back that limits her mobility.  We’ll forget about it by the next week, so it doesn’t have to stay on forever, but at least give some lip service to the injuries that would occur when someone gets knocked around.

My personal favorite when it comes to suspending belief so that you can go along with the fiction in front of you was “Transformers II.” I enjoyed the first “Transformers” movie.  Not so, the second.  It lacked plot, fell back on the smash ‘um up routine, and as the characters got beat up and tossed around, they never limped, got dirty or scarred up.  In short, it was unbelievable.

When theater you watch becomes unbelievable, it also becomes unwatchable.  You want to vomit.  You decide to leave the room.  You shake your head and roll your eyes.

After coming out of “Transformers II,” I remember running into a friend and his family.  He was pumped.  He asked what I thought of the movie, and I mentioned the negatives and why I didn’t like it.  He looked at me like I’d landed from Saturn and had five noses on my face.  

Some people suspend belief better than others.  They want to believe, so they do.   They don’t question how 15 minutes in real time can be the 15 seconds of a stick of lit dynamite burning down.  Or how the cop chasing the bad guy can run through four intersections, leap cars, dodge bullets and still catch the criminal without breathing hard or saying afterwards, “Dang, my feet sure hurt in these dress shoes.”

It’s probably too much to ask television and movies to include lines or scenes like that.  The audience would say, “That would never happen in real life.”  They’re right.

That’s because the situation would never occur in the first place.  When was the last time you saw a police person running through your neighborhood, corral the burglar, and cuff him?  If it does, but his chest isn’t heaving to pump air down his lungs, you’ll know it’s just a movie or TV show.