I don’t know about you but I’m getting to the point where I look at the expiry dates on my credit cards wondering, “I wonder which of us will go first?” I buy groceries and for the first time in my life I look at the ‘best before’ dates. This, for chemically-fortified foods of questionable nutritious value. I read those dates and think, “I should live so long.”
I go online like a good old boy in the new world and make purchases. This often requires a multitude of entries to allegedly secure sites and when it comes to entering the year of my birth I get a drop-down menu that requires scrolling to what seems to be the centre of the universe. When I get to my year (carpal-tunnel syndrome not withstanding) I see there are many years below mine. I get a false sense of relief; shattered only when I scroll further and discover that it appears people who fought in WWI are making online purchases. Who knew?
Statistically speaking (and God knows…there is no other way to speak today) I am not that old. Accuarians have me figured out. They know EXACTLY when to have the warranty expire on those devices I purchased online; timed to expire either a second after the devices craps or when I do. Whichever comes first. Another sign of age? Reading the fine print.
I am getting extremely sensitive about my birthday. Yes, it was in the last century. Yet somehow, framing it as being in the last century does give it a certain dustiness; like a relic you’d find in an unmaintained, unvisited museum., I used to be proud of the fact that my grandfather was born at the end of the last century but now it seems that last century was two centuries ago. He was born in the horse and buggy age and together, we watched man land on the moon, live on TV. (Or perhaps it was in Sudbury…the verdict is still out). Google would certainly boggle his mind.
Were he alive today, I am sure he would be thrilled to know that he too could make online purchases. After all, if he scrolled far enough, he would find his year of birth on many of the sites I visit.
In the past year, I have spent more time than I care to remember in hospitals looking at people (who could imagine) older than I, watching with a sense of foreboding as nubile nymphets disguised as nurses clean up the back end of some poor old soul who might still has some testosterone coursing through his veins yet with nothing left but feeble ambitions. I imagine him thinking to himself, ‘Would I, Would I!!?”
In a former life, my friend.
I do not see this as a positive sign.
Perhaps we have more than one expiry date. One for life. The other for living. Who knows? Certainly not me. But just as an added precaution, I think I will phone the credit card company and advise them that, yes, they will have to issue me a new card. Consider it my new lease on life. Give me credit for that.
Three Years on Mars 