Digital Stowaway

I have become aware of several things that I, a member of the digitized generation, cannot accomplish as a passerby in a largely analog world. (OK, so analog doesn't mean "uncomputerized," but there are so few acceptable words to use for this purpose that we need a neologism. I guess this semantic gap just goes to show you what a truly analog world we all belong to.)

Apart from my inability to come up with appropriate words without the use of my computer's thesaurus, my early technological exposure has also resulted in a profound deficiency in my letter-writing capacity. I don't know how to buy a stamp in real life, for example, although the campus post office in my illusory collegiate life will sell one to me if I provide my student ID. I also don't know how to address correspondents other than by saying, "And now over to Sam with the weather."

 (That was a pun.)

Then there's the mess of the library here at _____ College/University. Why, I wonder, has looking for a book not progressed to a Google-like system? It is simply alien* to me to have to deal with call numbers, which, incidentally, constitute half of my list entitled Why the Federal Government Should Be Abolished.** Call numbers entail not only manually and laboriously searching through shelves for precise letter and number combinations that are not even written on shiny screens that double as Facebook-viewing apparatuses, but they also require finding pens and pieces of pulverized tree pulp. How primitive indeed.





*The "aliens" to which I link are probably not really aliens. Saying that something looks like fossilized cyanobacteria just means it looks like squiggly bits in rocks. Trust me--I took paleobiology. Homeslice.
**The other half is the bad typefaces found on C-SPAN.