There's a remedy. I shut off the shower and pushed in the center of the head. It's supposed to be a self-cleaning shower head. There's a small spring inside. If you turn on the water and push in on the center of the head the shower clears itself.

Or it's supposed to. This morning after I tried pushing it in it did. But I know when I take a shower again tomorrow morning that one small jet of water is going to hit me in the face again.

That's because, like a lot of other things in this house, the shower head is trying to tell me something. It's part of the insurgency that lurks underground or behind walls or under the floor of the house, just as the insurgents in Iraq are invisible but in revolt, nevertheless.

Oh, you may laugh, but I have other instances to tell you about.

For example, there's the faucet on the kitchen sink. We just bought a new one and had a plumber install it.

The old one was pretty disused and it wasn't working well. The new one is much like the old. It has a single mixer valve and a flexible pipe that allows you to pull the faucet out and spray it around the sink.

The new one works just fine except that the water pressure doesn't equal that of the old one. I thought there would be a simple solution to this problem--just turn the water flow up.

So I got under the sink--not an easy task for a big guy like me--bumped my head a few times, cursed a few times and finally found the handles for the hot and cold water.

They were as open as the plumber could get them. So I called the plumber.

"Oh," he said. "That's the way it is with that kind of faucet. It's the faucet. You can't get any more pressure than that."

Well, that's what he says, but I know better. Both the faucet and the plumber are part of the conspiracy. They know full well that we've got more water pressure than that. They just don't want to let me use it.

I won't bore you with all the other little instances of rebellion in the house's plumbing, but let me tell you that it even extends to the lawn, or rather the lawn sprinkling system. There's this one valve on the system that keeps quitting. I can get it going with a lot of trouble.

So far I've only given you examples of how the plumbing is rebelling. But the conspiracy also seems to extend to my computer--actually to all my computers. I have a couple, a desktop and a laptop to be precise.

The laptop has always been balky. It beeps a lot in protest when I try to get it to do things, like correcting my spelling or saving something on a peripheral disk. I usually ignore these signs.

The desktop has been a lot more reliable. But a couple of weeks ago it suddenly just shut down. I tried all the standard remedies to get it back in service and they all failed, so I finally took it to the computer mechanic. He told me it was the motherboard. (I didn't even know my computer had a mother. And I always thought of myself as its father, or at least its lord and master.)

So I had the mechanic install a new motherboard. That worked for a while, but just a couple of days ago the desktop shut down again. Or rather it got as far in booting up as the splash screen where three little dots chase one another across the screen endlessly. They are supposed to run away eventually and the computer is supposed to come on.

Not mine. The three little dots are still chasing themselves across the screen, no doubt laughing silently at me as they go.

I'm sure there is a message in all these revolting signs and signals, although I am not sure I have been able to read it yet.

But what I think the plumbing, the computers, the lawn sprinklers, indeed all the mechanical devices in our house are trying to tell me is that I, after all, am just a dumb human and that I shouldn't try to get too inflated an ego.

All those parts of my environment want me to know that I had better show a little humility. I had better show it soon and I'd better not try to be a king, a dictator or even a governor.

Best to leave that to those who have a real confidence of their subjects.