At any given time, I’m carrying around three or four separate pieces of plastic that confirm that I’m really me – The card that gets me inside the fence, the card that gets me inside the building, an ID from three jobs ago that for some reason is still stuck in the back of my card holder, and my venerable old school driver’s license. It seems to me that it should be possible to take the information on all of those cards, link it into one master database, and then figure out how to issue me one card to rule them all.

Better yet, just let me keep all my pertinent information on my phone. Lord knows I’m not going to leave the house without that. It just seems that there should be better technology available than a metal chip sandwiched between two layers of plastic. Maybe the answer is biometrics – a thumb print and a retina scan to prove we are who we say we are and that we’re where we’re supposed to be. It just seems that in the last 100 years we should have made more progress than simply transferring information from a laminated paper card to a laminated plastic one.

Oh, and managing to make it something I’m not chronically prone to leave laying on the kitchen table when I’m on my way out the door well before the break of dawn would be pretty damned helpful too. Feel free to just jam a chip in the back of my head and get it over with. Sure it’s intrusive and has all sorts of negative privacy implications, but it would prevent needing to drive all the way back home to pick up my ID and that’s really the only thing I’m looking for at this point.