Keycards Take the Fun Out of Everything

There is a website called NationStates, inspired by the novel Jennifer Government by Max Barry. The premise is this - a nation that behaves however you want it to. If you want the whole country to be atheist, go for it. If you want the national currency to be shrunken heads, that's completely fine. You can do everything from becoming a nudist, anarchist state to a corporate police state complete with rottweilers.

This is one of my favorite websites to visit today - I have multiple pet projects going on there; a country that actually functions how I would have a country function, two ridiculously oppressive countries, and one country that is bordering on anarchy.

Why do I bring this up?

One of the early issues that you need to solve which effects your nation is about the movement of citizens and crime control. These options allow you to choose to install surveillance cameras in public places, a complete absence of government intrusion and something akin to bar-coding all citizens with a tattoo on the back of their head.

At School B (my current school), we have keycards as a result of a nearby police shooting a few years ago - it's a preventative measure against break-ins. I'm completely a fan of this idea. I don't like getting shot.

I have a feeling that naturally, many people feel the same way. Keycards are super. Really. I love them so much I could just die from love right now.

...I'm being a little sarcastic right now, can you tell?

Anyway, I really don't have much of a problem with the old keycard system. We originally used the side with the bar-code to unlock the doors to the school and gain entry in the mornings. That was really smart. This way, only students and teachers could get in - parents would have to be buzzed in by whoever was at the front desk, and strange people would be turned away.

"But my mom says it brings out my eyes..."

Now, I'm not saying that this should be scrapped completely. It is a helpful device if there is nobody at the front desk or if you need something to scrape gum off of the bottom of a chair. Looking at students around me, though, there is basically nobody who brings her card to school. They're ugly. When I wear the lanyard, it irritates my neck. The plastic casing that protects the cards is flimsy. Keycards fall out and get lost. If we lose them, we're required to purchase new ones. They used to be free, but now they're five dollars and they have to be shipped here instead of printed in the library where they used to be available for free.

Why do for yourself what you can outsource for a little extra cash?

Satan REPRESENT!

It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't made the stupid pieces of plastic mandatory to have on your person at all times. If you buy school lunch, you need it to get anything out of the cafeteria. The person at the front desk is forbidden from buzzing people in.

The person formerly in charge of buzzing people in is forbidden to grant entry to a freezing senior whose card was stolen.

Yes, the idea for this system is good. But when parents put in money for their children to access when buying cafeteria food and a child doesn't have her card, she shouldn't be punished for that. Administration seems to have caught wind of this fact, so now if you don't have a card, you have to write your name, the date and where you think your card is.

I decided to answer honestly.

This is how it went down.

I think that as long as the school is making money by selling lunches to these girls, they have no right to punish us for not having our cards. I mean, they can manually punch in the account in their computers, and they have to punch in our orders anyway, so what's the big deal?

If everybody who didn't bring a card with them boycotted the cafeteria, they would basically only make half of the profit. Combine that with their skyrocketing prices which people are already angry about and you have a very unhappy bunch of teenage girls.

Also, I haven't had a card since the first day of school and I'm still alive.

Take that.