Life's upcoming option: CTRL+Z

Isn't it a shame that life has no undo button? I could really have used an undo function in my life this week. It seemed to be a week of events that caused life to become chaotic and small things happened that were giant annoyances. In a restaurant a waiter walked by trying to carry three dishes of hot food. Suddenly, without warning, one of the dishes hit the floor and smashed at my feet with broken glass going in all directions. I felt sorry for the guy, but what could I do? If life had an undo button, one click and all the pieces of broken glass would fly back to the tray and reassemble themselves. Instead, the glass and food had to be cleaned up.

The undo button (CTRL + Z) on Microsoft Word is a wonderful thing. Backspace will fix a little error, like forgetting that the caps lock is locked or typing when you got on the wrong row of keys. But for really big errors, you need the "undo" button. Sooner or later, nearly everyone who uses a computer tries to do something that doesn't work. You are clicking along and doing the best you can when something goes terribly awry. You try to fix it only to find that your page has turned into a crossword puzzle. You don't have the foggiest idea how to fix this because you don't even know what you did to cause it. Then you remember that most wonderful of keys on the computer tool bar, the undo button. You hit the magic button and everything returns to normal, just like it was before.

An undo button would be a great thing to have around the house. Smudges and dust that accumulate in a week could be zapped away and I wouldn't have to spend the entire weekend cleaning. Wouldn't it be great to hit an undo button, see dirt fly out the door in a whirlwind, the dishes hop from the sink back into the cabinet, and the beds make up themselves?

I have always wished office elevators had an undo button. It seems that would be a much easier problem for technology than an undo button for life. Press a button on the elevator and you are going to that floor whether you made a mistake or not. Life is sort of the same way. But I’m sure even undo buttons would have their limits. If you make too many mistakes, undo only will undo a limited number of the most recent ones. If life gets really out of kilter before you notice, you might be out of luck even if life did have an undo button.