Airplanes. Plastics. Antibiotics. Those hats that hold beer in them. What do they all have in common?

They're all fine examples of how far technology has come.

And yet, sometimes, I can't help but think that we have not advanced far enough.

Let's set aside for the moment that doctors can perform quintuple bypass surgery. Forget that cars can turn a liquid substrate into high-speed motion. Allow yourself to neglect the concept of mass-produced socks and footwear accessories.

If it's not readily apparent what is missing in our lives, it will be clear in a moment.

Imagine, if you will, a Sunday afternoon. There is football on TV. Glorious football, on a 78-inch high-definition digital flat screen television, located mere feet from your head. Or, if you prefer, an episode of Friends. Women tend to dig that show for some reason.

There you are in your specially made padded chair. The heating coils are on, along with the cooling fans. Energy is being wasted on you for no meaningful reason. You clutch the cold beverage of your choice in your hand.

Then your dream turns into a nightmare.

You're hungry and no one else is home. Left to your own devices, you will surely starve to death in a matter of hours, wasting away in your tomb of plush, silky doom with optional five levels of massage.

You yell for pizza. And no pizza arrives.

You wait. You watch the clock while a nervous wrinkle cleaves your forehead. What is happening? What is going on? Why are your pleas going unanswered?

Scientists everywhere, take note of what I am about to say. You may feel a sudden urge to begin research immediately. Get a pen, you will need it.

I want a device that lets me yell for pizza.

It's simple, really. There are no complex instructions or buttons to fiddle about with. There are no instruction booklets to print in 7 different languages, paying no heed to the fact that no one speaks Latin anymore.

Just a device. I utter a phrase, and then there is pizza.

I have prepared a simple coding schematic so you can get started with product development:

#1#-Wait for yell.
#2#-If yell, then pizza.
#3#-Loop

I'm not trying to box you in. There is plenty of room for creativity here. I'll even let you select the comment that will bring the sweet, round goodness to me.

Just one thing, though: It has to be square. We don't want anyone to confuse the device with the pizza and mistakenly consume the device.

You can pick the color of the device. Again, I would caution against anything that looks like melted cheese. Also avoid deep reds, in the case of some nutball ordering "naked pizza."

The installation of the device is not a main concern. To start off, I would suggest installing it in the chair we mentioned earlier. Eventually, once we get costs down, it can be shrunken down and placed into buttons on shirts, blouses, and those long black boots with buttons on them that teenagers wear to get attention.

For safety's sake, the buttons should taste like chocolate, just in case someone becomes trapped in a desert and needs to eat their buttons to survive. We don't want to get sued every time someone goes wandering off into the desert and ends up dying.

Perhaps you are wondering how the pizza will arrive. That's the best part: it doesn't matter. My Pizza Yeller is not dependent on any one delivery scheme, which allows it to fully advance along with emerging technological breakthroughs. We could start by having vagrants or children drop off the pizza. Later, we could use robots.

And when robots become so commonplace in our future society that some of them are cast off to the streets, what do they become? That's right: vagrant robots. We will use them as well. That's the beauty of my plan.

The American People do not want to hear excuses. We do not want to hear about how unfeasible a request is. We care not for cost evaluations or delivery requirements.

We want to yell for pizza.

There you have it, scientists of the world. Now get cracking.