I assume that when this definition is applied to humans instead of computers, the brain is the central processing unit and the things that we are doing are the two or more processes…like walking and chewing gum at the same time.

To hear folks talk, there must be a bunch of them who are pretty good at this multitasking. Probably the original multitaskers in the business world, as I know it, are the receptionists. They can answer the phone, type a letter, greet visitors and sort the mail, all the while talking on the phone to a friend about last night’s date or this coming weekend’s party.

I couldn’t do that. In fact, when you get very far past the walking and chewing gum at the same time stage, I’m not much good at multitasking whatsoever. I don’t even chew gum very often anymore.

That’s not to say I haven’t tried multitasking. Back when I was spending a lot of time on the road, I did a pretty good job of listening to the radio while driving and even maintaining the speed limit before we had cruise control. Well, this isn’t quite the truth. I pretty much had to listen to news and talk shows because if I listened to music, the faster the music played, the faster my car went. Even after I changed over to the news/talk format, I got to concentrating too much on the talk and missed a few (bunch of) exits and had to turn around and go back.

My next multitasking challenge came when I had a car phone installed in my company car. I’d been looking forward to this for several years because it meant I wouldn’t have to hunt down a phone when I needed to make a call. I could be driving down the road and just reach over and dial up the person I wanted to call. Wrong. Trying to turn down the radio and remember or look up a number and drive and dial the number and talk and drive…you get the idea. This was entirely too much multitasking for me and I had to be very careful or I’d drift over into the lane with the car beside me or slow down to about 40 on the freeway or look up to find I was driving around 90. Even incoming calls were enough distraction to make me scare the shit out of myself a couple of times. It didn’t take me long to learn it was best to pull over and stop in a safe place when using the phone…I still do.

Apparently there are folks who can, or at least think they can, multitask pretty well while driving. You see people doing all kinds of things while tooling down the road. In my travels, I’ve observed young (and not-so-young) girls applying make-up and talking on the phone…I’d jab my damned eye out if I tried that…men shaving, people reading and doing crossword puzzles, many folks eating and drinking, people participating in various sexual activities that I’d best not describe further to a mixed audience, and probably just about everything else you can imagine being done while driving a car or truck.

I think I observed the greatest example of multitasking in a vehicle several years ago as I was driving on I-10 between Lafayette and Baton Rouge on the section we used to call the “Atchafalaya Swamp Speedway.” I was going around 80 and I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a car coming up fast behind me. I looked over as he pulled alongside and, I swear this is the truth, he was talking on a cell phone, with a newspaper spread across his steering wheel and a portable TV playing on the dashboard in front of him, all the while driving about 110. It didn’t take long for him to get out of sight, and for the rest of the way to Baton Rouge I kept expecting to come upon a big-assed wreck or at least find that he’d run off the road into the swamp -- but I never saw him again.

Everyone does multitasking of one kind or another during the course of a day; I’m sure there are some of you who are more into it than the rest of us, like those of you working on computers all day, or musicians, or doctors, or school teachers. School teachers have to be among the best, trying to teach something to 15 or 20 some odd of those little angels while acting as a jailer, baby sitter, surrogate mommy, nurse and referee, plus a half hundred other things.

While writing this, I decided to have one more try at multitasking. Y’all know how you can get radio broadcasts from the Internet? Well, I punched up one of my favorite talk shows with the intention of listening to it as I wrote this. Didn’t work. Either I’d quit writing and listen or write and quit listening. It’s painfully obvious that my central processing unit is incapable of multitasking at this point. Perhaps I need to run a disc scan, or maybe do something to get rid of all those superfluous bits of information floating around on my hard drive before it crashes…a cold beer might not be a bad idea.