Happy Hunting

It never fails - whenever you don't need something, you are constantly pushing it out of your way and then the second you need it, it is nowhere to be found. This can happen with just about everything, but it is especially annoying when it involves larger items you have to drive around looking for. The other day I had to mail a letter (a strange concept, I know). I could not, for the life of me, find a damn mailbox. If I had been in my own town I would have known exactly where one was, but since I was down on the Cape I had to search all over and I could not locate one. It took me way longer than it should have. Anyway, that got me to thinking about all the things we used to see everywhere, but are now increasingly hard to find out in the wild and which you have to go hunting for.

This led to me remembering back to when I was in high school and there used to be something called the 'Senior Scavenger Hunt', where kids formed teams and had to drive all over town trying to find things on a list. Then, like all the things during my time in high school which were cool for the grades just above me, some parents got involved because they thought it might be a safety issue, the teachers started a school-sponsored (read:lame) scavenger hunt where you didn't need to take the actual item, just a picture of yourself with it and the entire thing was immediately ruined. (Honestly, the same group of like 15 parents of unpopular children destroyed my high school experience.) Therefore, I never bothered to do my Senior Scavenger Hunt.

However, I did see the list for our Senior Scavenger Hunt and it consisted of things like a yearbook from before 1980, so I imagine this year's graduating class was out trying to find something that seems equally crazy-old to them.... like a TV antenna. Since they will already be out hunting, allow me to tack on a few more hard-to-find items for them to take a crack at tracking down.

-A still-in-business video store (5 points): No, a RedBox doesn't count.

-A Pager (10 points): A relic from back in the day when the only text messages you could get were '911', 'boobs' or 'baseball' if your friends were feeling really ambitious.

-A working payphone (15 points): Oh, payphones are everywhere. But just try and find one that will give you a dial-tone.

-A computer that still connects to the Internet through dial-up (20 Points): Honestly, even everybody's grandmother has a cable connection by now, right?

-A Phone Booth (25 points): Really, are there even any of these standing anymore? And if you can find a phone booth with a working pay phone in it then you should just go home, because you've won.