Sean Dietrich
I am not complaining. So help me, I’m not.
Idiots complain. And I’m not a complete idiot. Idiocy is all about percentages. I’m only 40 percent idiot, the other 75 percent of me is bad at math.
But this morning I was logging into one of my personal accounts, entering my password, which is a long complicated password that is at least eight characters long, contains one capital letter, one symbol, one article of punctuation, and the blood of a sacrificial goat.
And I got to thinking.
Did you know that the average American has an average of 168 passwords across personal accounts, with another 87 passwords for work accounts? Meaning that the ordinary American has an average of 255 passwords.
Then I found myself wondering how we got here. Have you ever stopped and thought about all the analog things that have disappeared from our daily lives?
For example, where did coin-operated horses outside supermarkets go? Why did we get rid of those?
How about gumball machines? Did my childhood dentist, who resembled Fred Mertz after a long night, confiscate them all?
What about prizes in cereal boxes? What happened to the free nautical whistle in Cap’n Crunch?
Sean Dietrich
Missing-person photos on milk cartons? The black plastic thingies on the bottom of two-liter bottles? Shirley Jones?
How about playgrounds? Where are the playgrounds? One study found that playgrounds in the U.S. have decreased by nearly 40 percent. Many schools are tearing down swing sets and monkey bars.
Speaking of kids. Where are all the tiny bicycles? Where is the army of young people pedaling through my neighborhood, unsupervised?
And why did laundry detergent commercials stop advertising how their products remove grass stains from children’s clothing?
What about tree-climbing? One study found that three quarters of American kids have never climbed a tree.
Also, what happened to checkbooks? I tried to pay for an oil change yesterday. I tore the check from my little book and the young mechanic just said, verbatim, “Sorry, brah, we don’t take checks.”
Consequently, what is a “brah?” And how did I become one? Will I always be a brah? Will I have the opportunity someday to graduate from this status into another variety of feminine undergarment?
And bugs. Where are they going? Over the last 50 years, scientists estimate that we’ve lost 75 percent of the insect biomass. One main reason is believed to be crappy music on the radio.
No, I’m only kidding. There are no radios anymore. Automakers are removing radios from their cars and replacing them with more cameras.
We have roughly 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. They are everywhere from public parks to rental vehicles. Yesterday—this is true—I saw a camera mounted outside a porta-john.
Please don’t misunderstand me. As I say, I am not complaining. I realize the Good Old Days were neither good, nor old. But I’m simply asking a series of nonsensical rhetorical questions, and I do this for a very important reason.
I forgot my password.