My New Toy

I love gadgets that I can understand.

See the greatest thing since sliced bread:

This is my new "Temporal Artery Thermometer."

What did you think it was, really?

You scan it across a forehead or behind the ear and in micro-seconds you have a temperature reading. What's even better, it has a "Silver Ion Antimicrobial Head" and "probe covers not required." I think that means I don't have to clean it or keep up with spare parts. I've already scanned our heads. I'm 98.2, Ricky's 98.6, Willey's 99 - all historically reasonable.

I'd like to ambush my older son and check it out on him when he gets home from school tonight. But my better judgment will likely prevail.

His recent bout with a severe stomach virus and up and down fever that lasted over a week got me thinking our family needed a new thermometer. The old one has been used hard and put up not very sterile, actually not sterile at all. And I just happened to ask a nurse about them recently during Wiley's appointment (good recommendation.) And then the ultimate sign that it was meant to be - there was ONE left on the shelf at Sam's Wholesale Club tonight.

I'm a firm believer in signs.

I'm not sure I would have bought one of these a couple of years ago. This is what the advertising looked like:

To me that looks like something out of the Twilight Zone or maybe Star Trek - a mechanical Vulcan mind meld device. And I know that having "accuracy comparable to rectal" was never on my priority list.

The instruction manual for this older model was twenty-eight pages. How could you ever need twenty-eight pages to explain how to slide the tip across the forehead, then read the numbers?

The company's marketing is improved, but still needs work. The thermometer itself no longer looks like it's designed to suck your brains out and the packaging reference to rectal accuracy is now part of a Harvard Medical School seal of approval in a more discreet location. (That makes me laugh.)

But isn't 75.7 degrees more likely the temperature of a corpse?

Hope someone gets sick soon so I can "take his temperature."