MARK MY WORD: SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY NEEDED TO TRACK KIDS AND PARENTS

Parenting could get a little easier, if only we had a global positioning satellite system in our corner.

In Washington state, police recently used such satellite-linked transmitters to track a murder suspect's movements. Thanks to the technology, the cops got their man.

If it's good enough for the police, it should be just fine for parents who want to keep tabs on their fast-moving children.

Imagine, we could keep track of our children with a transmitter in their book bags or woven into their jeans.

Becca and Bailey are forever on the move in our neighborhood, visiting with friends, rearranging the fallen leaves or just hanging out in our front yard or one of our neighbors' yards.

Of course, it could be exhausting to keep track of their every move at home or school.

It might not stop there. If the technology is in our homes, we'd probably find other uses for it.

Husbands, for example, might want to track their wives' Christmas shopping journeys.

But I'm not sure global-positioning-satellite systems are up for such a task just yet, particularly the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping marathon when hordes of shoppers descend on every retail store in America in search of Amazing Ally.

For those who aren't familiar with toy land, Amazing Ally is a doll that talks and acts almost like a real kid, except that you don't have to send her to college.

She has been hiding out lately, which explains why no one can find the doll on store shelves.

I've never been brave enough to crowd into a shopping mall on the day after Thanksgiving. My advice: If you have to go, wear armor. Better yet, drive a tank. Even that might not be enough to get you in the door, what with all those shoppers stampeding through the aisles to see who can grab all the toys first.

The way I figure it, Santa must be short of elves at the workshop. Otherwise, we wouldn't have to put up with popular-toy shortages and those dreaded store rain checks.

If only Santa would let us buy direct from his North Pole workshop, we could avoid all that shopping hassle.

But that might put the economy in a tailspin. We don't want to make the economy sick so we go on shopping.

Actually, it's our wives that go on the shopping safaris. We do our best to stay out of the combat zone.

It takes talent to read through a zillion store ads and map out a present-purchase plan that would rival an NFL game plan.

In the not-too-distant future, I'm sure smart shoppers will be armed with global positioning satellite devices to pinpoint the exact aisle and shelf location of that hard-to-find Christmas toy.

At that point, husbands might get more involved in shopping, provided that we could keep track of things by remote control.

Anything would be better than the current chaos of Christmas shopping in America, which has become a contact sport.

At one store in Louisiana Friday, shoppers beat down the doors of the stockroom to get more merchandise.

Even minivans aren't big enough to haul off all the Christmas merchandise that Americans want to put under their trees this year some $180 billion worth.

Without global-positioning-satellite technology in our home, it will be tough to keep track of our children and all those gifts-in-waiting on store shelves. But I'm sure we'll survive.

I'm not so sure about all those store clerks.

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.