My fellow readers and citizens, I am writing to discuss what is rapidly becoming an epidemic. Maybe even a pandemic. Epidemic at a bare minimum though. This something-demic is happening around you and you may have scantly noticed. You may have fleetingly gazed the whatever-demic right in the eyes and continued walking. You may not be fully aware of the specific-demic because you haven't been in the trenches. But my friends, I have.

You see in my formidable years I was a 450. It was my first ever job. That's right - we're talking high school here. 450 was the code name for the uber-important job I had, a job that I'm fully convinced to this day had the most job security of any job. The company was Kmart and 450 was code name for "buggy pusher." Of course the job of the 450 extended beyond that of buggy pusher, I also got to clean shit up. That coke from the "restaurant" in the store you dropped? I cleaned that up. I also cleaned up a lot of other stuff, but mostly I pushed buggies. The buggy pusher has job security because if there are no buggies there is a finite limit to what consumers can consume. If it weren't for me pushing buggies back into the store after consumers had filled them up with merchandise and left them scattered all over the parking lot, and occasionally in odd places like the parking lot of the Popeye's Chicken 1/4 mile away, the whole Kmart corporation would have gone bankrupt. Oh wait, Kmart filed for Chapter 11 in 2002? I bet it had something to do with buggy pushers. Anyway, back on track here. Yes, my first job was as buggy pusher at Kmart. Yes it sucked. Yes I did work my way up the ranks and eventually worked in a department (Home Improvement and Automotive) with a boss who would threaten physical harm to you but give you the choice of whether you would like it upstairs (meaning the stock room) or outside (meaning outside). He's a store manager now! Anyway, back on track again.

By this point you may be saying "What the heck are you talking about?" and "Why haven't you posted anything on your site for 2 months?" Both are very good questions and I'll answer the former shortly and the latter now. We bought a house and have been getting it all set up and settled into. It's very nice. It has both an inside and an outside. But enough of that. Back to my, how the French say, je ne sais quoi-demic. Though pushing buggies was a crappy job, it definitely helped build some character and give me a great appreciation for non-crappy jobs, such as my current job. Push enough buggies in the middle of the summer in Louisiana where it's 115 degrees with the heat index and you can appreciate sitting behind a desk for at least the next 50 years. Pushing a line of 20 buggies, trying to angle it in straight through the doors, sweating your ass off, that's good stuff. Everyone should have to do that! But now this character building job is in jeopardy. That's right people. You've seen it! Automated buggy pushing. The kid still has to operate the little remote control but the equipment does all the work for him! At first I saw it at Target and dismissed it because it's Target and what do they know? But I saw this the other day at Wal-Mart. This is unacceptable! How will kids build character if they don't have to push buggies by hand? This has gone too far. It's like teaching math with a calculator. Granted, when you get to your advanced coursework you'll need it, but early on you have to learn addition and subtraction and division the long way. How will these kids ever have any appreciation for their future jobs if they get to "push" buggies with a little remote control and not actually have to exert any energy? Some people probably even think it's cool to push buggies with the remote control. That's just wrong. A job like that should totally suck and no one should ever enjoy it.

Now granted, I've become one of those people I said I'd never be by doing the whole "When I was a kid we didn't have these fancy things, we ate dirt and we liked it," but come on, let's keep buggy pushing real! We can't have a nation of kids who don't know what it's like to push buggies! I think that's why our nation's children are getting fatter: automated buggy pushing. That's right: it's the root cause of all the problems. Automated buggy pushing is what's wrong with this country. And I have just one question, which I ask with all sincerity, "Where the heck was automated buggy pushing 10 years ago?" I could have really used some of that.