Earlier this week, I went to an informal school reunion. I was going to go as an astrophysicist CIA agent, but apparently you have to go as who you really are, so I went as Unemployed Fellow in Odd Shoes™. It was our first reunion since we passed out of school in 1999.

Yes, 1999. I am in fact so old, that I went to school in a whole other millennium (and I had to walk six miles to get there and back, both ways uphill.) If I’d tried to write this column in 1999, my computer would have taken a year to type each word out, and when I hit “Save”, I’d have to dive behind a table and hide just in case it exploded from the hernia-inducing effort of it all. We were all very afraid of Y2K back then, a bug that was supposed to destroy every computer on Earth (except Chacha Chaudhary) when the year 2000 came. Turns out that the programmer who came up with that theory was Mayan, so never mind.