When you become old enough, suddenly the crazy shit that happened to you turns valuable. It's what historians are calling a "primary source:" you were there, so you would know what happened. Now that I'm slowly becoming old, the government has dispatched a crack team of social scientists to invade my privacy. They live in my house and follow me around in order to collect any errant brain dropping I may accidentally emit while making coffee.
This living situation is unusual to be sure, but it gets results, which is why the government now mandates it. Any historian can tell you about a moment where a supposedly-useless factoid suddenly turned into big hoopla. And if there's one thing that I have gained a lot of over the years, it's useless factoids. Just last week, in fact, I told these pimply-faced young authorities about the concept of a "shopping mall."
In passing, of course. I just assumed that everyone I meet has already seen a shopping mall. One of the nerds in the back immediately whipped out their book of vital statistics and told me that only 9.6% of the human population alive today was present for the heyday of shopping malls, and most of them were stupid babies. This data was on page three. There's a little chart and everything. Once I had baited the line so delectably, I had to then spend the next two hours explaining to these overgrown children that you would drive your car to the mall, and leave it outdoors in a big asphalt structure known as a "parking lot." I drew them a little picture.
At that realization, there was a sharp gasp. Suddenly they knew what all the left-behind piles of burned rocks outside every major building were. One of the cyborg kids immediately got up, ran to another room, and phoned the Prime Minister. This discovery alone made the Old-Person-Harassing-About-The-Beforetimes Project worth its annual budget.
Now, even more kids are hanging out in my house. Needing a place to put all this folxpower, the government has paid my neighbours to abandon their domiciles and go live somewhere with nicer weather, like what remains of Alaska. Every day, I get up, make my coffee, rub my sore knees and back, and tell the kids another potentially-contradictory detail about the time I got fired from a Spencer's.
