12 Things for a Better World

  1. Plastic wrap in packaging that has an edge to tear off the needed amount in a straight edge – and really works – to put an end to struggling to rip off a piece and end up with a crumpled mess folded over on itself.
  2. A communications company – cellular phone, cable television – that will communicate. You could call and speak with an actual person without wasting a half-hour of your life responding with keypad or voice (that is not understood) to computer-generated prompts.
  3. Specialty contractor you can hire to come to your house and remove all no-longer-used cable – telephone, cable TV, satellite TV, Internet, power/transformer cords – that are hiding behind furniture or inside walls
  4. A smartphone app: English-Starbucks dictionary so a neophyte can place an order without embarrassment at one of the ubiquitous coffee stores where “Tall” means small. You could order with confidence a “double-shot grandé frappe no foam with room” and no one would look funny at you.
  5. A portable Transporter like what is used in Star Trek. When you find a Yukon XL S.U.V. parked in a space – likely in a space and a half – labeled “Compact,” you can dematerialize the over-sized beast and beam it to a field of weeds, then park your Prius in the space that is rightfully yours.
  6. Costco shuttle – a vehicle – preferably electric powered – to carry you, and the giant-size items you purchased, from the store to your vehicle, parked far away at the other end of the dangerous parking lot. (Inside the store, traffic signals at aisle intersections and painted lines on the floor, like on highways, with no-passing zones, wouldn’t be a bad idea either.)
  7. Standardized bath fixtures in hotels. This would avoid the danger of breaking the shower control by turning the handle when it must to be pulled to start the water. Or avoiding the perverse trick where the hot is on the right and on the left is cold.
  8. Warnings on beer labels: “This is not locally-produced craft beer. It’s made by a giant multi-national conglomerate but packaged to make you think it’s a small brewery. The money you spend on this will leave the country.”
  9. A No-Children section in restaurants, preferably with a soundproof wall separating it from the other diners. Because the food in bars – where people younger than twenty-one without fake ID are not allowed – typically is not very good.
  10. Smartphone, tablet or computer setting that blocks emojis. Because the emoji is the harbinger of the end of language. Texting has already replaced speaking to each other anymore, or writing in complete sentences. If we don’t stamp them out, in the future we’ll communicate without using language at all. Future historians will be able to do little more than interpret the cryptic symbols.
  11. Lengthy prison terms for bicyclists who come up from behind pedestrians without giving warning. Capital punishment if there is a bike path separate from the walking path.
  12. An app that will delete something you posted on the Internet and now want to remove… Ha! Ha! Ha! Just kidding! Nothing says “Forever” like what you put out on the Internet.