daily frustrations – In a personal reflection tied to Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday, columnist Steve Lopez connects everyday modern hassles—expense-report login failures, endless forms for medical care, and TV and cable chaos—to a larger fatigue he feels about aging and a world that
Mel Brooks turned 100, and Steve Lopez admits he wants to congratulate the comedy legend for reaching the milestone—but he’s not sure he wants to duplicate the achievement.
He’s writing from a mood that feels familiar to anyone who has spent a long stretch fighting with modern systems. Earlier, he got off the phone with a tech assistant trying to help him access his expense reporting system. To get in, he needed a code from an authenticator. After 48 minutes, the assistant couldn’t figure out the glitch and promised to follow up—“it might be tomorrow morning.”.
Lopez says he tries not to focus on aging. He doesn’t think he’s “a grouchy old man stuck in the past. ” and he describes himself as still out in the world—just not standing in line for coffee anymore. He even mentions being able to download a photograph onto his wristwatch. But the everyday grind has started weighing on him.
Small inconveniences, he argues, add up in a way that makes life feel more exhausting. He wants the option of putting a quarter in a meter instead of downloading a sixth parking app. And he says there’s one word people keep tossing around that grates on him: “perfect.”
His examples are petty, but the annoyance is real. At restaurants. he says. receptionists often respond to his name with “Perfect.” He wonders how someone can know everything is “perfect” without even asking the practical question—like whether the reservation is for the right time. He illustrates it with a moment where he provided the correct name and arrived exactly at 6:30. only for the receptionist to say “Perfect.” He doesn’t get a free cocktail—at least not from the word itself.
He extends the complaint beyond restaurants, too. Lopez says these quick exchanges often happen without eye contact, and he jokes that he hopes the people who seem not to notice others get replaced by AI.
Then he brings it back to the kind of care and discomfort that doesn’t come with a smiley receptionist. He has a 3-year-old beagle named Philly. Every once in a while. he says. the dog scoots around on his butt—a sign of discomfort that he didn’t teach him. Lopez took Philly to get help and checked him in at the front desk.
“What’s his name?” the receptionist asked.
“Philly,” Lopez said.
“Perfect,” the receptionist replied.
Lopez says the word landed wrong when the visit wasn’t about something cute—it was because Philly was having his anal glands expressed. Lopez reads the dog’s eyes and doesn’t buy it: even if the receptionist says “Perfect,” the beagle doesn’t think so.
The frustration returned later with his own medical appointment. For several weeks, he had an itchy bump on the back of his scalp. His wife noticed him scratching it and told him—bluntly—that he should see a dermatologist. Lopez describes the process that followed: filling out 12 or 18 online forms. providing the same life details. then arriving at the appointment only to be asked again whether his address and insurance have changed in the time since he submitted them.
The biopsy revealed an issue. When he went back, he says, the receptionist asked what he was there for.
“Squamous cell carcinoma surgery,” Lopez said.
“Perfect,” the receptionist responded.
He’s careful about the comparison, saying he’d rather have a small bump sliced off his scalp than have Philly’s anal glands expressed—but he still can’t shake the sense that the word “perfect” doesn’t belong in moments that don’t feel that way.
The “perfect” theme blends into a broader picture of how he thinks modern life has become harder to handle. His television has been “on the fritz.” He traces the problems to canceling their landline—“like pulling the last thread that kept our lives from unraveling.” After that. he describes sorting through dusty cables and cords. trying to figure out which device is which. He says pressing the right buttons on the remote can feel like roulette when there are four choices.
He’s also stuck in the maze of who to call: it’s anyone’s guess whether the right answer is the phone company or the cable company. To solve those problems, he even jokes that people should keep a real estate agent handy, so they can just sell the house and let someone else deal with the setup.
Passwords, he adds, are another trap. If you’re like him, you end up digging through forgotten credentials for accounts you don’t recognize. He ties it to the strain modern troubleshooting can put on relationships. recalling that infidelity and money problems were once seen as major causes of broken marriages—then arguing that the new top reasons for divorce might be forgotten passwords and not showing enough sympathy when a spouse is on hold for 83 minutes and counting.
His wife, he says, does most of the troubleshooting. Still. he made one call to the cable company after his TV flashed a phone number and an extension so he could fix a stalled hard drive and restore his 53 episodes of “The Rockford Files.” He dialed. but the extension didn’t work. and no one picked up.
He believes the number on the screen might have been an error code instead of an extension. He joked that getting it fixed would require a congressional investigation. When his knees were nearly buckled by shooting pains behind his eyeballs. he dialed again and reached a friendly voice that said: “I’m Eva. your AI agent. How can I help you today?”.
That moment becomes a turning point in his frustration. He doesn’t see the setup as progress. “This is not sustainable,” he writes, describing a fear that driverless cars will eventually run into data centers and the whole system will collapse.
He acknowledges that technology has delivered thousands of advances during his lifetime—his smart phone is full of helpful apps. But from where he sits, he says people are “more wired but less connected,” and definitely more frazzled.
He returns, at the end, to Mel Brooks’ birthday and the thought he can’t shake: he doesn’t know how much longer he’s got. He says he’s thinking of going off the grid.
“It’s going to be perfect,” he writes—an ending that reads less like a promise than a quiet dare to a world that keeps insisting on the word.
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