Well, ok. Anyway, I chose my banana and doughnut and went to stand in line at the counter. The girl typed in the price for the doughnut and then she picked up the banana and held it to the scanner as if to read the bar code. Quickly and with some small embarrassment, or a quick laugh at herself she said something akin too, "hmmmph, whew, bananas don't have bar codes" then with another quick laugh she typed in the code. My brain went somewhere and came back with the reply that,"well with technology as it is today I wouldn't be surprised if they don't start genetically engineering a bar code into them." she snickered lightheartedly and caught the modern irony of the thing and I went to work.
Oh boy, Bar codes, bananas, genetics, genetic code, bar code. Yeah, the genetic bar code of the banana!
"Good buds, big. Big, buds. Good, big buds, Big buds. Big good. Big. Mr. Big, Bud Good, Bud Good. Mr. Big is Bud Good."
That's right. I've narrowed my synaptic reasoning down to a Cheech and Chong movie.
If that isn't scary enough I dwelled on this most of the morning after getting to work. No, That's not all I do at work but this morning was work that I had done a thousand times before and it was as if my mind and body was pre-programmed for the operation at hand and was as much autonomic as anything else so I could do things like think about all the technology advances today as they might affect the market place as it relates to the banana and other fruits.
So I started thinking that "you know what? If they could actually genetically engineer a banana to grow with a bar code then they wouldn't need as many big huge pieces of machinery to grind up all that pulp wood. Then they wouldn't need all that other type of machinery to process it into little sticky pcs of paper. and they wouldn't need all that petroleum or other based ink products and the machinery to print those little codes that aren't bar codes that they stick to the sides of fruit before they sell them to let the girl at the counter know what to punch in to the machine that lets you know how much to pay for the banana or other fruit.
Wow, the only ones getting rich here are the people that engineer the genetically engineered bananas which grow with bar codes already embedded in their peels. skins, What the hell do you call those? I mean, you peel a banana but of what?<--digression at it's worst.
whew, that would eliminate all the people who were previously needed to build and operate the machines that do all that coding on the little sticky pieces of paper that they stick to the side of bananas and other fruits for the girl at the counter to accidentally swipe as a bar code before correcting herself and typing it in.
So now we have the issue of either saving the planet by not using all those resources and polluting the place to make those little sticky things for the sides of fruit. Or eliminating a lot of jobs because we will already have the bar codes on the sides of bananas and other fruits upon maturity of the fruit.
Ha! that way we can also control when the fruit is picked! If we genetically engineer the bar code to become readable at just the right time we'll have a constant source of perfect bananas every time! No more "earthy tasting bananas because they've been picked too early to get them to shipment to collect the almighty buck as soon as possible but a perfect banana every time.
Then since the bananas will be perfectly timed for their picking every single time the demand will go up because of more people buying bananas because they can count on the perfect banana every time and more farms and workers will be needed to pick all the perfect bananas in a perfectly timely manner and the balance will have been restored.
Yeah,good thing we resolved that one huh?
Oh no, we've eliminated the middle class. We've gone from all the people designing machines, operating machines, picking fruit, etc to just engineers and pickers.
sigh
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