Your Utterly Depressing Future

You know what other group of people live and die by the U.S. Postal Service? The approximately 2 million people locked up in our country’s supermaxes, prisons, jails, and juvenile halls.

Oh, and us geeks who still read the New Yorker and the Economist on the dead tree version.

/please don’t tell the GOP, then they’ll really kill the USPS.

My grandfather used to carry on these long, meaningless snail-mail exchanges with all sorts of companies he did business with, which, given that he was retired, meant mostly insurance companies and the SSA. I think it was his way of feeling relevant long after he’d left the workforce. It was kinda pathetic.

@Serolf Divad: I think I will work until I’m dead now, or at least struck down with dementia (I’d rather be dead before that happens anyway).

What would senior citizens do without their monthly copy of Harriet Carter? Or the incessant reverse-mortgage offers? Look them up online? Silly rabbits. Everyone knows the olds can’t use a computer!

Just to set the record straight – –

#1 Retirement is pretty nice – no nasty commutes to commune with idiots.

#2 Yes, some of us are not computer savvy, however, others are pretty quick with MAC or PC. Where do you think all this web detritus comes from?

#3 My mailman is the only basketball intelligent human in my area. Don’t take his job!

@BobCens: Yes, some of us are not computer savvy

I should record the next phone call when I try to explain to my mom — who is 78, but who has been using Macs for fifteen years, and an Apple III before that — how to double-click an icon.

@nojo: Perhaps the click speed on her mouse needs adjusting?

@karen marie has her eyes tight shut: First she would need to understand the concept, and that’s a half-hour right there.

I finally got my brother to help when he was in town: We got iChat running, and now I can just take over her computer when I need to. Although that requires her to accept my “commandeer your computer” request, and we still don’t have that routine quite down.

I toyed with the idea of getting my dad an iPad last year. But he’s even worse.

@nojo: I don’t know about that. I had a 72-year-old client who continually fucked up with the double-click. I then sat down with her to adjust the click speed and it turned out that was why she seemed not able to get it — mouse was needing a speed faster than she could double click. Us young’uns are able to go “clickclick!” whereas older folks go “click. click.” If that’s the way she does it, you can customize the speed to suit her ability.