On top of most current consumer-level digital cameras is a setting on the exposure mode dial that is usually a green picture of a camera. In this exposure mode, the camera takes care of pretty much everything, from white balance to autofocus mode and everything in between. To be polite in class, I call it “green box mode,” but my photographer friends and I refer to it as “idiot mode,” since only an idiot would use it, at least in our condescending view. (You could call it “Aunt Millie mode” too, since you might set your camera to it when handing your camera to Aunt Millie at the family reunion.)

I thought of this because I am presently in my own “green box mode,” since I am suffering from a classicly-symptomed head cold. One of the things I do for a cold is to take plenty of powerful cold remedy medicines, some of which come in a green box. Also, since they contain antihistamines that make me drowsy and seem to linger in my system, they make me the very idiot who would use the green box.

Disclaimer about “idiot mode”: not you.

In high school, I wrote two funny things about the head cold. The first was: “My head cold has turned into a body blizzard.” The second was a diatribe about the three stages of a cold, which I recall are 1) The Scream Stage, since it feels like I spent the entire day before screaming. 2) The Pack Mule Stage (or PMS), so named because it feels like someone packed a mule into my sinuses. 3) The Piece of Whatever Stage, because I will sometimes cough up a “piece of … whatever!”