Sticker Shock

Here in the US everything has a bar code so that it can be electronically scanned, tracked, inventoried, sold, returned, and consumed. Even fruits and vegetables started having these little stickers with barcodes attached to them about ten or fifteen years ago.

I was eating this pear’s twin this afternoon (the pear’s pair, as it were) and I was distracted. I was eating over the sink to minimize the mess since it was an excellent, tasty, and juicy pear. I was staring out the kitchen window into the back yard, watching a couple of squirrels clean up the leftover bird seed from the morning’s feeding. In my hunger and distraction, I may have bitten in and eaten that little sticker.

It made me pause. Then the questions started. (My brain does that…)

Was I in danger? Probably not I figured. I guess the biggest danger would be that it would lodge someplace and not digest or move on, blocking the natural flow of things, if you know what I mean. (You know what I mean!) But it was small, thin, and lightweight, so it wasn’t like when little kids eat quarters or dogs eat the squeaky thing out of toys that they got by ripping the “indestructable” toy apart in thirty seconds. I didn’t see any surgical interventions in my future.

As some philosopher said, “This too shall pass.”

Would it poison me or degrade into something toxic? It’s not even really paper, more like some kind of thin plastic, or Tyvek. Late-stage capitalism might be encouraging that sort of thing, especially if it actually costs money to use materials that not only don’t kill the consumer but are tested in advance to prove that. But still, there’s also the healthy fear of being sued for $50,000,000,000,000 by my heirs (and not a penny less!) so let’s assume that I’m okay there.

Just in case, should I try to make myself vomit it back up? First of all, ewwwww! Secondly, as stated above, it was an excellent, tasty, and juicy pear. Why ruin that experience with a backwash of gastric fluids? And thirdly, if there was any danger from this sticker going down, having it coming back up with some velocity behind it would have to be more dangerous. Right?

So should I go to urgent care? The emergency room? Um, no. Those places are full of sick people! These days with the flu, the seventh (or is it the eighth? ninth?) COVID wave in full swing, and god knows what other contagious bits flying about, I’m far, FAR safer here at home and taking my chances with the natural passage of the sticker through my GI tract.

Great! I have nothing to worry about! Enjoy the rest of the pear! (I did.)

Except…

It occured to me later that, with the government at all levels having abandoned us to COVID, the best and often only measure for tracking it is the wastewater monitoring. And by “wastewater,” in case you haven’t thought this through, we mean “raw sewage.” And now in about 36 to 48 hours that wastewater is going to have this sticker and its barcode sailing through the system. The testing is all automated, which means computers. The wastewater testing setup probably has various optical and biological testing equipment hooked up to a big computer and it’s running a lot of specialized algorithms to run a lot of specialized sensors and equipment. Which is all well and good, except that that ultra specialized software’s 17th cousin twice removed on its mother’s side is the scanning software from the self checkout line at Piggly Wiggly.

It may be looking for parts per billion of COVID in my sewage, but it’s gonna see that bar code and go off the charts. Or it’s going to launch our ICBMs. Or it’s going to call the aliens hiding in the asteroid belt and tell them to abandon us because we’re neither intelligent or civilized. (If the alien overlords are watching Fox News, this will not be news to them.)

Whatever happens – it might be my fault. Or the squirrels’.