Talk Back: License to drive ... you crazy

Did you survive the big scare? Not only was last Tuesday morning’s thunderclap loud enough to give us a heart attack, but big booms that time of day mean only one thing. Something wicked this way comes. And sure enough, a couple hours later some dark-web cyber-fiend brought everything to a screeching halt by locking us out of our connection to what’s going on. Proof positive R.E.M. was right.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

Being conscientious, civic-minded folks, we hastened to our favorite social media platform — the one with the little blue lower-case “f” — so we could alert as many of our friends as possible. But like we said, somebody’d pulled the plug. And no matter how many new passwords we tried, nothing worked.

Looks like we’d picked the wrong week to buy stock in Meta.

But two hours later, the old log-ins were working again, everything was back to normal, and oh were we ticked. Despite forever losing 120 minutes’ worth of Dad jokes, Stark Trek memes comparing Old Kirk to Newkirk, and the best of Calvin and Hobbes what did we get for surviving the Great Facebook Meltdown of 2024? Nothing.

Not even a lousy T-shirt.

You know what else is lousy? Michigan’s new-fangled driver’s licenses. What a mess! Even though we’re still trying to get used to the one with the Mighty Mac at the top, Uncle Ronnie’s put out the call, “Madam Secretary, tear ... down ... that ... bridge,” and just like that, it — along with the hologram that you can’t even see unless you tip it just so — have pulled a vanishing act, only to be replaced by Dolly Parton’s coat of many colors. Or maybe it’s a coat of arms.

With a pair of deer on their hind legs, fixin’ to bust each other’s chops Rock’em Sock’em Robot-style.

It’s all in the name of adding new security features that’ll make licenses harder to fake, the Secretary of State says. Funny, they said that the last time they rolled out a new design. And the time before that. Maybe this one will be the end of the line. Not because driver’s licenses are going away. But because if the sight of a moose and elk duking it out aren’t enough to give would-be counterfeiters the willies, nothing will.

Although you gotta admit, Moose and Squirrel would have been a lot better idea.

But no. Now the license comes with laser perforations, touchable indentations, engraved data, and we don’t know what-all. It’s enough to make you drop your big orange drink. It starts out with your name, which now takes up two lines instead of one. Apparently, somebody had too much trouble fitting “Bob Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff” into just one row.

“Bob,” you see, takes up way too much space.

And that’s not all. Now they’re putting letters — M, F, or X — directly below your address. How dare they! Your social medial preference — MeWe, Facebook, or the platform formerly known as Twitter — is nobody’s business but yours. A blatant HIPPA violation if there ever was one.

But the worst thing they’ve done is get rid of that swipe strip on the back. And right after we’d mortgaged the farm to buy the world’s most powerful degausser. Here we were, all set to make billions

by running it across tens of thousands of magnetic stripes and permanently scrambling the dossiers of personal information they contain. But no. The state pulls a fast one on us by transferring all that data to a barcode instead. Doggone it!

Looks like we picked the wrong week to sell our sandpaper stock.

— Talk Back with Doug Spade and Mike Clement is heard every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern Time at localbuzzradio.com, Facebook Live and dougspade.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Talk Back: License to drive ... you crazy