Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Demographically Challenged

Being cheap, I tend to do a lot of those nagging little surveys that appear along with receipts from the local grocery store, drug store, restaurant, etc.

I figure, if they want to give me a discount next time I grace their doors, or give me a freebie, or enter me in a contest to win cash, I'm all for taking five minutes out of my day to play their game.  You scratch my back?  I'll scratch yours!

But an alarming trend has been occurring in the last few weeks.  I seem to have jumped demographics.  And, frankly, this is serious cause for pondering life as I know it.

Would you believe, at the tender age of 45, that I now have to check the age box for 45-64 year olds?

WHATTHEHELL?  That's makes about as much sense as having the age range of 1-20 years on a survey.

What, in Sam Hill, do I have in common with a 64 year old?  Let's see....we both eat.  We both poop.*  We both sleep.  Yup.  End of list.

I don't have grand kids.  I'm not (yet) pondering the daily wearing of diapers.  Denture cream, smensure cream.

I am so appalled at this little change that I had visions of another company's egregious mistake when I was in my late 30's.

MORE magazine decided, since I was turning 40 sometime in the future**, and since their rag was definitively the place to read about keeping fit after 40!, keeping your face from developing map worthy lines!, and keeping sex in mid-life interesting!, that they would go ahead and solicit my readership.

Well, that went over like a lead balloon.  I started crying, looking through that free issue.  Every other page was an Estee Lauder ad with an 18-year-old girl pawning off $90 bottles of cream for my face, designed to keep me from looking my own age.

Any page that wasn't a paid advertisement featured a woman who had clearly been handled by people wearing kid gloves and carrying silver spoons since the time she was an embryo.  There was NO WAY these women had gotten a wicked, freckle-inducing sunburn on the cheap beaches of Texas because she wanted her baby's feet to touch "big water" when he was two.

Needless to say, I never subscribed to that magazine.  And, somehow, my life for the past five years hasn't seem to have suffered one bit.

So, I'm pondering whether or not it is worth filling out that next Petco survey to save $3 when I buy my next bag of cat food.  That same coupon that, for the life of me, I'll never remember to take with me to the store.  Until it has expired, naturally.

And, there is the crux of the issue.  I can't remember to take the coupon with me, which means I'm getting older, which reminds me I'm solidly in the 45-64 year old demographic, which just sucks.


I feel a good, long cry coming on.....



*And, I bet I'm more regular, fiber or no.


**And, I felt about turning 40 just like Sally did in When Harry Met Sally:  "But it's there. It's just sitting there, like some big dead end."

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