Our Old Road Is Rapidly Aging

With the sad recent death of Tim May, I am reminded about how well he predicted the changing world that we live in. Just last week I trading in my car, for a slightly newer one. And so I handed over a large piece of green paper with a bar code at the side — don’t ask me what it was — and the salesperson smiled and ripped a bit off, and told me to sign it and “send it in” (I didn’t like to ask at the time what “send it in” actually meant):

And so I handed my keys to a person that I had only just met once before, and who had sat quietly with me on a test drive. The process of the hand-over involved scribbling on the many pieces of paper that were pushed in front of me, and to which I “drew” a nice wavy line in reply that confirmed that I can scribble something on a piece of paper, and then tried to remember the date without referring to my phone. As a test of scribbling, I am sure I did a good job, as the salesperson seemed impressed with the authority and confidence of my wavy line. I just hoped that I could replicate the line at some time in the future, but I forgot to photograph it (as that would have looked a bit strange).

In the end, I felt slightly satisfied that I had actually remembered my car registration without referring to OneNote. As a backup, too, after I had parked the car, I had even taken a photograph of my old car with its registration. As for my home…