I received the blood pressure machine I ordered from Amazon today. It looked like it would be the perfect instrument for letting me know if my pressure was high or low. And it wasn’t cheap. It came packaged as neatly as any Apple creation. It had the superior look of a product that knew what it was doing.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be too smart for me.

I should have learned my lesson about “smart” products years ago when I bought ceiling fans for the lanai. They were beautiful. Sleek and stylish. The electrician who installed them explained that I could program the fans to do everything but sing Windy.

What he didn’t tell me was that every time the power went off the fans would reset. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. But these fans reset themselves to OFF. To get them to work again required the pushing of several buttons and other frustrating contortions that ended up with me staying inside in the air-conditioning.

Shortly before we put the house on the market, we called the electrician and had him replace the keypad and reset the fans.

“This will work much better,” he said confidently.

I’m praying we don’t have a power outage, I thought.

A couple of months after the house sold, I had lunch with the new owner, a delightful young woman who has become a friend.

“Everything working okay?” I asked. I know it’s a dangerous question. If she said “no,” there might be the expectation that I would replace whatever had failed. And I probably would.

“The fans on the lanai,” she said.

I held my breath.

“We had to replace them. We couldn’t figure out how to make them work.”

I nodded knowingly. “Yep, we paid a lot of money for those smart fans, and they outsmarted us every time the power went out.”

Thank heavens she laughed.

Back to the exotic blood pressure cuff. I should have expected problems when I turned it on for the first time and it told me to download THE app.

“Crap. I don’t want to download an App. Just tell me what my blood pressure is.”

It remained adamant. So I downloaded the App and opened it. It wanted me to “enter this setup key in your authentication app.”

What the hell is an authentical app? And oh, by the way, the “key” was 29 capital letters and numbers. I’m not kidding.

Okay, okay. I went to the App store and downloaded the Google Authenticator. I can’t stand Google, so it was painful, but I put on my big girl pants and did it. Then I very carefully entered the authentication key and noticed when I finished that one of my Cs was lower case. I couldn’t just correct it; I had to go back and retype that entire code.

When I finished and hit enter . . . do I need to even tell you . . . it said “invalid code.”

It was at that point that I began pounding on my desk and screaming at the top of my lungs. “I just want to find out what my f—–g blood pressure is. Why are you putting me through this torture?”

Fortunately for me, my partner, who was taking a nap, is deaf without his hearing aids. Otherwise, he would have immediately called 911 and had me carted off to a mental hospital.

Still steaming, I went back to Amazon and told them I was returning the gadget that had arrived less than an hour earlier.

“It was just too smart” was not one of the reasons available in the reasons for return, so I told them it didn’t work. And for me, that was totally the truth. I have boxed up the machine and am waiting on Amazon to send me a return label. One thing I know for sure. I don’t have to measure my blood pressure today. It is definitely HIGH.