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make my phone ring, it would appear on my checks and credit cards, it would adorn my passport, it would get me a video.
    Of course, it would mean rewriting a lot of computer programs, but I’m sure it could be done. I intend to take it up with my own computer company, just as soon as I can get at that serial number again.

I have very happy hair. No matter how serene and composed the rest of me is, no matter how grave and formal the situation, my hair is always having a party. In any group photograph you can spot me at once because I am the person at the back whose hair seems to be listening, in some private way, to a disco album called “Dance Craze ’97.”
    Every few months, with a sense of foreboding, I take this hair of mine uptown to the barbershop and allow one of the men there to amuse himself with it for a bit. I don’t know why, but going to the barber always brings out the wimp in me. There is something about being enshrouded in a cape and having my glasses taken away, then being set about the head with sharp cutting tools, that leaves me feeling helpless and insecure.
    I mean, there you are, armless and squinting, and some guy you don’t know is doing serious, almost certainly regrettable, things to the top of your head. I must have had 250 haircuts in my life by now, and if there is one thing I have learned it is that a barber will give you the haircut he wants to give you and there is not a thing you can do about it. So the whole experience is filled with trauma for me. This is particularly so as I always get the barber I was hoping not to get—usually the new guy they call “Thumbs.” I especially dread the moment when he sits you in the chair and the two of you stare together at the hopeless catastrophe that is the top of your head, and he says, in a worryingly eager way, “So what would you like me to do with this?”
    “Just a simple tidy-up,” I say, looking at him with touching hopefulness but knowing that already he is thinking in terms of extravagant bouffants and mousse-stiffened swirls, possibly a fringe of bouncy ringlets. “You know, something anonymous and respectable—like a banker or an accountant.”
    “See any styles up there you like?” he says and indicates a wall of old black-and-white photographs of smiling men whose hairstyles seem to have been modeled on Thunder-birds characters.
    “Actually, I was hoping for something a bit less emphatic.”
    “A more natural look, in other words?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Like mine, for instance?”
    I glance at the barber. His hairstyle brings to mind an aircraft carrier advancing through choppy seas, or perhaps an extravagant piece of topiary.
    “Even more subdued than that,” I suggest nervously.
    He nods thoughtfully, in a way that makes me realize we are not even in the same universe taste-in-hairwise, and says in a sudden, decisive tone: “I know just what you want. We call it the Wayne Newton.”
    “That’s really not quite what I had in mind,” I start to protest, but already he is pushing my chin into my chest and seizing his shears.
    “It’s a very popular look,” he adds. “Everyone on the bowling team has it.” And with a buzz of motors he starts taking hair off my head as if stripping wallpaper.
    “I really don’t want the Wayne Newton look,” I murmur with feeling, but my chin is buried in my chest and in any case my voice is drowned in the hum of his dancing clippers.
    And so I sit for a small, tortured eternity, staring at my lap, under strict instructions not to move, listening to terrifying cutting machinery trundling across my scalp. Out of the corner of my eye I can see large quantities of shorn hair tumbling onto my shoulders.
    “Not too much off,” I bleat from time to time, but he is engaged in a lively conversation with the barber and customer at the next chair about the prospects for the Boston Celtics and only occasionally turns his attention to me and my head, generally to mutter, “Oh, dang,” or