Saturday, January 12, 2013

Officially Anti-Choice

It’s official.  We give people too many choices and it is getting on my last nerve.  Every clothing store, deli counter, car wash, and massage parlor seems to have a menu of options longer than the Magna Carta.  You can get your salad in a bowl or in a tortilla or deep fried and served in a cone of newsprint.  You can get 2 for the price of 3 or half a dozen for the price of 6, but only if you fill out some paperwork and leave a urine sample.  The problems that this modern reality creates are like the stars - too many to count and yet they all manage to appear every night with merciless consistency.

My chief complaint is that we have created ever growing number of options while humanity’s ability to make good decisions (or really any decisions) continues to deterioriate.  “Would you like olives on your pizza?” “Oh, you know, I hadn’t really even thought about that.  Let me take a few minutes with this line of people behind me to consider.  Do I like olives?  What are olives anyway, when you really think about it?  I’ll tell you what, can you put olives on half the pizza, but like, alternating slices?”  This is not final Jeopardy and Ken Jennings (or his pizza-ordering equivalent) is probably going to beat you at life anyway so you may as well go ahead and make up your mind.  


 

But there’s a group that is even more likely to get Darwin’d in the next go-round than the rubes who get stumped at Domino’s.  It’s not that these individuals get thrown for a loop by an unexpected decision (though heaven help us if one of them ever got his hesitant little finger on the big red button that would nuke the Russians).  These bottom feeders don’t even understand what they were there to do in the first place.  They are the ones who will wait in a 20 minute line at Starbucks only to get to the front and start thinking about which drink to order.  “You want to know what drink I want?  What is this, a Starbucks?  Oh, it is a Starbucks, my bad.  No no, don’t skip to the next person, I’ll decide rill fast.  Now let me see...do you guys have high-fat soy milk?”

Now there’s a subtle theme running through both of these examples that the most astute among you will have caught.  The sense of entitlement to infinite customization means that everyone feels they have license to negotiate with any poor checkout clerk with a credit card reader and a waning will to live.  Do you see that giant sign about the merchandise you are about to purchase?  The one that explains, literally in black and white, every detail about the terms by which you can part with your money in exchange for whatever trivial nonsense caught your eye in a rare moment of lucidity?  Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s the ballgame.  You may not use 30 Groupons (ha! remember when Groupon was a thing?) to make this shirt cost -$10.  And I’m sorry about that unfortunate combine incident but you may not get a pair of shoes of 2 different sizes.  And that discount is for senior citizens, not potheads about to wrap up their 12th semester of community college.  

I can hardly believe I’m saying this but I think we have finally found the one and only virtue of communism.  The toilet paper may have been rough and in short supply, but at least they didn’t have to wait in line behind some comrade demanding paper towels.