If they can put a man on the moon ...

     

If they can put a man on the moon ... 

I wonder why no one has invented a dental drill that sounds like Vivaldi’s Spring or even Barry Manilow’s Copacabana—or for that matter, the patient’s own iPod playlist? When the dentist drills, my senses of sight, smell, and touch are in la-la-land but I can still hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee screaming a hole into the center of my brain. Birdsong? Ocean waves? Dental procedures have become surprisingly pain-free, but now it’s time for some bright person to make dentists’ tools sound more relaxing.

Can’t they train baristas to pick up cups and mugs without touching the rims? That seems unsanitary to me, and it’s very common.

Why does Amazon.com send me a product review request for an item I bought directly from someone’s Amazon Wish List? Does Amazon’s computer not realize the gift recipient, not I, will have the opinion? Amazon is usually king of user-friendliness, but they dropped their scepter in the can on this one.

Speaking of computer programming gaps, this past year I registered online and verbal dissatisfaction with services of two companies. The vice president of one of the companies even called me on the phone to apologize and offer to fix what they had messed up. And she did fix one problem. But both companies continue to hound me with weekly e-mails hawking the specific services I had told them were unworkable for me. I find it hard to believe these two technologically sophisticated companies do not have a way for the customer service department to communicate to the marketing department to pull a customer from their mailing list. I worked in marketing for decades, and back in the dark ages, we could easily manually pull labels of people who had requested no mailings.

So I ask you, if they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they … [You fill in the blank!] ?