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have a telephone but have not yet mastered its use, most products also carry helpful printed tips such as “Remove Shells Before Eating” (on peanuts) and “Caution: Do Not Re-Use as Beverage Container” (on a bleach bottle). We recently bought an electric iron that admonished us, among other things, not to use it in conjunction with explosive materials. In a broadly similar vein, I read a couple of weeks ago that computer software companies are considering rewriting the instruction “Strike Any Key When Ready” because so many people have been calling in to say they cannot find the “Any” key.
    Until a few days ago, my instinct would have been to chortle richly at people who need this sort of elemental guidance, but then three things happened that made me modify my views.
    First, I read in the paper how John Smoltz, the Atlanta Braves star, showed up at a training session one day with a painful-looking welt across his chest and, when pressed for an explanation, sheepishly admitted that he had tried to iron a shirt while he was wearing it.
    Second, it occurred to me that although I have never done anything quite so foolish as that, it was only because I had not thought of it.
    Third, and perhaps most conclusively, two nights ago I went out to run two small errands—specifically, to buy some pipe tobacco and mail some letters. I bought the tobacco, carried it straight across the street to a mailbox, opened the lid, and deposited it. I won’t tell you how far I walked before it dawned on me that this was not a 100 percent correct execution of my original plans.
    You see my problem. People who need labels on mail-boxes saying “Not for Deposit of Tobacco or Other Personal Items” can’t very well smirk at others, even those who iron their chests or have to seek lathering guidance from a shampoo hotline.
    I mentioned all this at dinner the other night and was appalled to see the enthusiasm and alacrity with which all the members of the family began suggesting labels that would be particularly suitable for me, like “Caution: When Door Says ‘Pull’ It’s Absolutely No Use Pushing” and “Warning: Do Not Attempt to Remove Sweater Over Head While Walking Among Chairs and Tables.” A particular favorite was “Caution: Ensure That Shirt Buttons Are in Correct Holes Before Leaving House.” This went on for some hours.
    I concede that I am somewhat inept with regard to memory, personal grooming, walking through low doorways, and much else, but the thing is, it’s my genes. Allow me to explain.
    I recently tore out of the newspaper an article concerning a study at the University of Michigan, or perhaps it was the University of Minnesota (at any rate it was somewhere cold starting with “M”), that found that absentmindedness is a genetically inherited trait. I put it in a file marked “Absentmindedness” and, of course, mislaid the file.
    However, in searching for it this morning I found another file intriguingly marked “Genes and So On,” which is just as interesting and—here was the lucky part—not altogether irrelevant. In it I found a copy of a report from the November 29, 1996, issue of the journal
Science
entitled “Association of Anxiety-Related Traits with a Polymorphism in the Serotonin Transporter Gene Regulatory Region. ”
    Now to be perfectly candid, I don’t follow polymorphism in serotonin transporters as closely as I ought, at least not during the basketball season, but when I saw the sentence “By regulating the magnitude and duration of serotonergic responses, the 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) is central to the fine-tuning of brain serotonergic neurotransmission,” I thought, as almost anyone would, “Gosh, these fellows may be on to something.”
    The upshot of the study is that scientists have located a gene (specifically, gene number SLC6A4 on chromosome 17q12, in case you want to experiment at home) that determines whether you are a born worrier or not. To be absolutely precise, if