If someone doesn't respond to a phone call, I think they've died.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
All Pixar movies are heartbreaking, aren't they?
In the age of social media, everyone's a newspaper columnist, exaggerating what they think and feel.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
My brain knows best-before dates are a con; my panicky gut treats them like a nuclear countdown.
The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.
I've got a phobia about throwing up.