A month or so ago, I was browsing msn.com, and a link blared at me: “Tired of singlehood? Try zapping.”

I'm thinking, great, so now the new tactic du jour is to incapacitate the object of your affection. And I'm pretty sure that's been done — and orange jumpsuits don't complement my figure.

Turns out, according to the Reuters article, we have L.A. to thank for the next big thing in effortless dating. It's a tech-savvy singles party where participants fill out a questionnaire and the information is saved in a digital memory device that is stored in a necklace.

Participants can then point their respective devices at a potential mate's to check their compatibility. Green means go, and red means run the other way. I guess yellow means, “Maybe a Blockbuster night isn't so bad.”

“Zapping” is getting some positive feedback. One party-goer, a 33-year-old professional woman, said, “I have zero time to meet people but I want to be married at some point. I'm trying to meet someone interesting."

In this fast and furious world, it seems as if there are hardly enough hours in the day to juggle the rigors of responsibility, let alone rummage through and try on potential happily-ever-afters. Time is not on our side. But then again, neither is luck. Or aptitude, for that matter. Fortunately, zapping doesn't require any of these assets.

It does, however, require you to fill out a questionnaire. Which raises red flags: Can you trust that Prince Charming or Princess Charisma has filled out an honest one? More specifically, could YOU fill one out? I don't think I would intentionally deceive, but I get easily bored and distracted.

And the samples never seem to contain answers like (d) all of the above, or (e) mostly “a,” a little bit of “b,” and sometimes “c” on a bad day. If there were ever a zapping party in the Alamo City, I'd be easy to spot: I'd be the one with the necklace emitting a defiant purple gleam.

Moreover, zapping fits snugly into this digital age of finding love on online dating sites and solving compatibility through a Rubik's cube of testing and psychoanalysis.

Call me an analog girl, but I don't know how deeply I trust technology to find “the one.” Or how comfortable I would be reducing butterflies in the stomach and schoolgirl giddiness to scientific theorem. I'm sorry, but I've worked with technology, and there's too much room for error — crashing, miscalculating and having quirky glitches. All of which I can do very well on my own, thank-you-very-much.

Then again, maybe notions like zapping aren't trying to do this love thing for us, but give us a head start. And with life — and love — seeming to smack around us at breakneck speeds, we'll need it.