The World I Never Got To Meet 3

The World I Never Got to Meet

(A Humorous Song — approx. 5 minutes)

I caught the tail end of the analog world,

Then watched somebody switch it off.

I got the paper menus at the diner,

Right before they made the paper soft.

My grandma talks about it like the old country,

Bread was a nickel, things were built to last —

She had one fridge for thirty-one years,

Now nothing I own gets past its second update... man, that went fast!

Oh, the world I never got to meet,

Where a fridge just made things cold!

It never asked me to agree to nothin',

Never froze up, never grew old.

It hummed through Nixon, it hummed through Reagan,

Like an appliance at peace with itself —

Now my toaster needs Wi-Fi and a firmware patch,

And my ice maker's in cahoots with somebody else!

My parents bought a "smart fridge" in 2022,

Let that phrase sit with you a while —

'Cause "smart fridge" implies a stupid fridge,

And the stupid one's the one that still works, meanwhile!

Three years in, they stopped the firmware,

The touchscreen froze on an error sign,

The ice maker needed the cloud to function —

For reasons known to engineers... and possibly a darker power divine!

Oh, the world I never got to meet,

Where a fridge just made things cold!

Grandma's fridge served under six presidents,

My parents' fridge couldn't outlast a phone contract, truth be told!

It's not an appliance, it's a subscription,

With a little door on it, oh man —

Welcome to the future, folks,

Where nothing you buy ever works as long as it can!

Everything is a portal now, my friends,

God bless the diners, every one —

Menus sticky in a way you don't investigate,

And a waitress says "the soup today is chicken," hon.

One person telling another person about food —

Six thousand years of uptime, no outages reported yet!

But step outside and the menu's dying,

And I am watching it go extinct, one QR code at a time, you bet!

(Spoken, with swagger)

Now let me get this straight...

I gotta scan a code... taped to the table...

To open a PDF... to create an account...

To LOG IN... to find out they serve mozzarella sticks?!

(sung)

Some grown adult stood up in a meeting,

And said "what if customers had to sign in first?"

And the whole room said YES, and that man got promoted,

And I inherited the results — this timeline is cursed!

I just wanna look at food without a password,

I just want my ice without a server farm,

I just want a fridge that fridges,

And an appliance that won't do me harm.

Grandma, tell me 'bout the old country,

Where the soup gets announced out loud,

Where bread costs a nickel and things get FIXED,

And the only cloud was in the sky — not in my ice maker, for crying out loud!

[Final Chorus — big and triumphant]

Oh, the world I never got to meet,

Where a fridge just made things cold!

I'll keep that laminated menu,

Sticky mysteries and all, worth its weight in gold!

So here's to diners, here's to grandmas,

Here's to appliances at peace —

May your fridge outlive your phone contract,

And may your mozzarella sticks never need a login screen... please!

(shouted)

Now somebody tell me the soup of the day!