AND WE CALL THEM . . . THE POD PEOPLE.

They're the ones with Things plugged into their ears, wandering about in their own little worlds, hearing nothing around them. Ipods, phones, headsets.

I remember my first encounter with a Pod Person. It was Oldest Daughter with her first ipod. The ear thingy was so small, the cord so unobtrusive, that I didn't even see it and couldn't figure out why she was ignoring me when I spoke to her. Turns out, she couldn't hear me.

My first experience with an ear phone was when a friend of Oldest Son's went out to lunch with us. I had never seen one of those phones before. He did seem to have something hanging on his ear, but hey, you don't want to be rude by mentioning it. Maybe he needed a hearing aide.

During lunch, every now and then he would start talking to thin air. By the time we were done, I was seriously concerned about his apparent psychosis. Later my husband explained to me that it was just a phone, and the kid's girlfriend kept calling him on it.

The bizarre thing about ear phones is this: there are no physical clues that a person is talking on the phone. Some things about our existence have become so ingrained in us that we don't even realize it, and one of those is phone behavior. It seems perfectly normal for someone to talk to someone who isn't there--as long as they have their hand up to their ear. Hand-to-ear is the universal signal for I'M TALKING ON THE PHONE.

Even when car phones and cell phones and wireless phones came out, you still had to hold your hand up to your ear. The alternative to this is a secretary with a phone cradle, but she does the Shoulder Hunch, so you know she's on the phone just by looking at her.

But, these new ear phones. People who have them tend to just keep them on all the time, and, out of the blue, start talking. You can be talking to someone who suddenly makes a slight motion of their hand in your direction and totally changes the subject, and it can be whole minutes before you realize that they are now talking to their Great-Aunt Martha or their boss, not to you any more.

I don't like these phones.

What I want to know is: What happened to flying cars? Every science fiction book or movie that predicted the future, ever, I bet, had flying cars in it (okay, not if it was a future where mankind had been wiped out by a virus or something, but you know what I mean).

The Jetsons had flying cars. Back To The Future had those cool hoverboard things. By now, we were absolutely supposed to be flying on a personal level, not on jumbo jets. Forget the phones. I want my hoverboard.

But did any science fiction book or movie ever predict the actual future, the actual 2006? A society of apparent delusionals, people who walk along the street talking to themselves? Nobody saw it coming.

I'm thinking about electronics this morning because Oldest Son is camping out in a Target parking lot with two friends, and about fifteen other guys, in forty-degree weather, to buy a new electronic game that comes out in about, let's see, an hour and twenty minutes now. No, not the PlayStation one--a cheaper, simpler one, thank goodness, although the whole electronic game thing still makes me wince and moan whenever I think about it.

This camping out thing is his "birthday party." Film at eleven.