#21 SAG

I’m sending a card to my brother the other day and it mentions VCRs and DVDs and so on. It says if he’s expecting those things for his birthday he’s SOL. And I want to comment to him on those letter combos and I think I should use the word acronym. But I look it up to be sure. My older brother's a stickler for usage and grammar and all that there stuff. No, it turns out—at least according to my dictionaries—that the correct word is abbreviation. Unless you can make something that sounds like a word out of the abbreviation. Like Radar for Radio Detecting And Ranging or WAC for Women’s Army Corps. ATM doesn’t count, but a PIN does. SUV doesn’t count, but its VIN does.
So get to the point, Funny Guy. I’m about to NOD off here, you say. Well the point is, I think I found a new acronym. The SAG. Oh no, you sigh, another rant about lazy America. Sort of. It’s about my personal laziness. Now I go back and forth on this laziness thing. The other day as I was putting a stamp on a letter I grumbled to myself about how we live in such a lazy society we don’t even have to lick our own stamps anymore. Two seconds later, because I wasn’t using one of those new envelopes with the press and stick strip I got a paper cut on my tongue. Be careful what you bitch for, as my mom used to say.
No, the SAG I’m talking about is one we all encounter nearly every day in this computer age and I’d be willing to bet less then one tenth of one percent of us has every read all the way through: The Software Acceptance AGreement. S.A.G. You know what I’m talking about. The legal gobbledeegoop you have to go through before you can download new software. You always have to check one of two little choices—I accept or I don’t—before the “next” button is enabled and you can get on with downloading the newest whizbang program that’ll get your computer running as fast as it did when you first bought it; before it was more loaded down with cookies than a daytime TV watcher. Of course, you have no way of knowing whether this new program—purportedly offered to you for free to make your computing experience that much more lovely—is not itself loaded to the cyber-gills with software designed to take you over, slow you down, trip you and roll your personal internet habits down the hill of commercial exploitation. And you sure as heck don’t want to read this daunting 20 page Software Acceptance AGreement to find out what the heck it is you’re accepting. So a little whine escapes from your lips, your shoulders droop and your whole psyche collapses. You’re beaten. They’ve won. They probably already have your entire life in their database anyhow. Good acronym though. It’s what my spirits do whenever I see one of those agreements. They SAG.
America, ya gotta love it.