I have never understood the whole “road rage” thing that has been sweeping the nation. Maybe it’s because I’m a generally peaceful guy and will usually put up with people who drive slow enough in the left lane to be able to bear and raise offspring by the time they get to Hy-Vee.

Actually, I’m worried that said person is probably my mom, who thinks it’s OK to back traffic up from here to Uzbekistan as long as no one gets into a serious accident. I fear the day that she does something aggressive like honk the horn, or God forbid, flip the bird, because I’m sure that all the pent-up road rage my mom has caused will suddenly flare up into the next World War.

Likewise, I’m a little disturbed at recent surveys of British Internet users which document a new trend creatively labeled, “Net rage.” Nearly three out of five British Net users suffer extreme physical and emotional distress because of slow or unreliable Internet performance. The symptoms include attacking your computer, attacking your desk, or even attacking the person next to you out of frustration.

Of course, the British have always been insensitive and rash; here in America, we would at least try using our firearms on our computers before turning on innocent bystanders.

But seriously, Americans need to take a moment, perhaps while we reload our handguns for the next car trip, to worry about the consequences of Net rage. Sure, the survey only dealt with Brits, but history has long shown us that dangerous British trends, such as the Revolutionary War and Elton John, will eventually reach our shores.

Net rage can affect you more than you might imagine. A survey last year found that one in five Brits were more devastated by computer problems than being dumped. The survey this year found that 86 percent of Brits ranked Net frustrations as a bigger concern than sexual worries.

So do you see how harmful Net rage can be if not dealt with? Unless, of course, the Brits just don’t value their lovers very highly. Or maybe their relationships with their computers go beyond “professional” and will someday be headline fodder for the Weekly World News (“PRINCE WILLIAM ADMITS AFFAIR WITH CHARLES’ LAPTOP”).

But in general, people find computers to be heartless machines, which just encourages rage, according to Helen Petrie, a professor of human computer interaction at London’s City University. “It’s not surprising we feel frustrations with the Net more than anything else,” she told the London Evening Standard. “You have no comeback with a machine, no one to talk to, even to shout at.”

So I can already imagine the chorus of people yelling at me, and all the other computer engineers, to make our pathetic selves useful by building a smarter computer, maybe even one that has the self-esteem of a junior high boy, so that it will go hide in a corner and cry when we taunt it.

That’s a good idea, but it won’t work.

First of all, my computer engineering courses have taught me that everyone including me is too stupid to create a computer that can add, much less cry. And secondly, computers are too smart as it is.

Right now, they are smart enough to crash just as you try to send off a 20-page e-mail to your loved one. A smarter computer wouldn’t even wait for you to finish before it decides it wants to run off with your boy/girlfriend, which might not be a big deal in Britain, but would still raise some eyebrows here.

However, I have an even better (i.e. easier) idea taken from old episodes of “The Addams Family.” We could design a peripheral that looked just like a disembodied hand which would be controlled by an infrared sensor hooked to your PC.

Whenever you so much as cuss or do anything else out of rage while waiting for a webpage to load, this hand would deliver a powerful slap upside your head to help cool you down and prevent you from further embarrassing the human race. We could call it the “Hand of Peace” and make it mandatory to be included with all Windows PCs, which are currently the leading cause of people’s fists being lodged into monitor screens.

The only drawback I can see is how the Brits might enjoy their computers slapping them. I don’t even want to think about it.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in computer engineering and journalism and mass communication from Iowa City.