Rachel “Andy Rooney” Alexander—An Op-Ed Blog

{3:18 minutes to read}

Why is everything so truncated and terrible these days? Why can’t we have something that works well?

Years ago, we had our credit cards swiped by store clerks. Then, we had to swipe them ourselves, and now we have chip cards, allegedly for our protection, that require considerably more time to process. Since I started using my chip card, I’ve had my first security breach. Chip credit cards—take longer, more complicated. Horrible!

So, what I want to say is that everything is being abbreviated to something worse than its original.

For example:

Actual in-person visits were replaced by telephone calls; phone calls were replaced by emails; emails (and conversations) have been replaced by text messages; text messaging has been replaced with emojis; breaking-up has been replaced with ghosting. And so on.

That’s a lot of replacing of things that actually worked well in their original form.

So, I have a proposal. Why don’t we just keep on truncating everything into oblivion?

In New Jersey, we’ve gotten it down to two seasons—winter and summer. Remember how we used to have four seasons? How last-year! Spring and autumn, while admittedly favorites of many, are time consuming.

And why do we need to have all 12 months of every year? Why don’t we just cut out the excess and “bottom line it,” as my dad would say. Let’s save time and only have two months: January and July. That way we don’t have to waste our time living out all those months of the year, celebrating religious and secular holidays and the birthdays of our children and loved ones. We can just cut out that pesky inefficiency; cut those pork-barrel months and cut to the chase.

This will also resolve our pursuit of longevity. One need only reach age 30 to have lived 360 years! Looking only a fraction of one’s “age.” Sounds to me like two problems solved!

If Great Britain can break from the EU, shouldn’t we keep pace and break from the planetary system altogether? I mean, who needs the whole moon circling the Earth and Earth circling the sun thing? Why should our schedule be so contingent on those two? Who is the sun to be so revolved around? Why not call it quits with nature and do our own thing, which will maximize efficiency. It will minimize quality of life, true, but you can’t have everything.

AND, we will be living greener because we no longer need as much paper for calendars.
This has been Andy Rooney in for Rachel Alexander.