Alright, so you probably can’t get rid of it, but you can make it look like it’s defective. Make it look like it’s sending way too many false positives. Find somewhere where you can get away with making obvious mistakes and then make like fifty of them in a row. “Why would I, an intelligent human being, just sit in the middle of an empty street doing donuts in an 18-wheeler for 10 straight minutes? I have a job to do,” you say. If you got one of those “constantly monitoring everything you say” things Amazon tried rolling out, just start spouting random gibberish. Some pencil-pusher at HQ sees a transcript come back that just says “reptile shoestring meridian front sawdust henway ball Amtrak septuagint ladder correct horse battery staple java thorpe 2 Chainz” over and over for like 40 pages, worst-case scenario he’s not gonna read it, best-case scenario he’s gonna think the company’s paying way too much for shit that don’t work.

My class was set to graduate right around the time the pandemic hit and a lot of people ended up graduating late because the school literally couldn’t offer the classes they needed to finish their degree. Anyone to whom your date of graduation is actually relevant likely isn’t going to bat an eye at anyone who was in college within the last 5 years graduating a couple months late.

And, of course, there’s that old stand-by moral of “the only reason it seems like all your peers are doing better is because the ones in the same situation as you aren’t going on social media to brag about it.” So don’t rely on that as a metric too heavily.

“You there, on the motorcycle! Sell me one of your melons!”

Seems like everyone’s been getting that noise lately. I’m on my third.

Where on earth would you find a wall on a road with a fotorealistic continuation of the road printed on it?

Spoken like a man who has never relentlessly pursued a roadrunner, nor taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

“If these devices were, as previously believed, implements in some sort of ancient ‘throwing game’, I can only assume this to be the result of a misguided attempt to play the sport on horseback or, heaven forbid, to teach the horse to play the game itself. Truly, our ancestors were a primitive people.”

Horseshoes would probably be pretty confusing, actually. Figuring out sans context that this weird metal crescent was supposed to be nailed onto an animal’s hoof would be a feat on its own, but add on people hanging them up as decoration out of superstition or just, like, throwing them, especially in places where there aren’t any damn horses, that’s really gonna muddy the waters.

My vote’s for either vacuum cleaner attachments or old batteries. I barely know the appropriate uses and contexts for all these vacuum cleaner attachments, some future guy with presumably no foreknowledge of our culture or lifestyle doesn’t stand a chance. And if we’re far enough in the future that no record of our way of life remains, I don’t care how much they keep going and going, those Energizers are gonna be dead, and these archaeologists are gonna all be scratching their heads trying to figure out why we have so many random metal cylinders in all different sizes that are, at best, completely inert, and at worst leaking caustic sludge.