East Greenwich High School Spectrum 11/89

The Extinction of Z

A growing problem in the school system, apart from me, results from the scheduling of classes in alphabetical order. People ordered near the end of the alphabet won't get into the classes they want. The current system will result in poorer education, lower-paying jobs, a shift toward poverty, higher death rates, and eventual extinction of these people.

This effect will move up the alphabet, killing everyone in its path. By the year 5082 it has been estimated that all working human beings, by the process of natural selection, will have at least thirty-seven A's before their last name. (This figure does not include one radical sect, reported to me by my friends in 5082 via their personal time warp, that has split off from mainstream society and assumed names consisting entirely of obscure punctuation symbols that no one could agree on how to alphabetize.) Three thousand years after that, it will take a full thirty-two minutes to say the "aaaaa" before anyone's last name.

This presents another problem, however. The maximum number of letters the name blank on a credit card or SAT form can hold, as anyone knows, is thirty-one. With only this number of letters being significant, one person will be indistinguishable from another, and all will share the same credit rating. Turn around and look at the person next to you. Do you really want his SAT score? Of course you do! But that's not the point--he probably doesn't want yours. The economy will reel from this inescapable communism.

The future looks bleak. The process is already beginning: except for the few odd Winspers and Zorabedii that roam the halls, names near the end of the alphabet have virtually died out. Take a look at the "A" people around you. Do we really want a world full of these? Think about it.