Young. Not merely young at heart, trust me!

It happened.
Again!

What happened, you ask?  Ok, let me tell you about it.

I figured that I would get myself, or get for my vehicle, a one-year pass that would allow me to park the vehicle at the national forest spots without having to pay each and every time.  A simple thing, right?  You ask for it, they tell you how much it is, you pay, and it is all over.

Not so.

"May I help you?" asked the guy in the ranger uniform, who looked like he was close to retirement age.  As I walked up to his counter, I noticed a fracture-cast on his right arm.  But, I did not sense that he was a small-talk guy, and I chose not to ask him about the arm.

"I want to buy an annual pass, the parking thing" I told him.

"Let me get my wife and she'll help you" he said as he wandered off to find her.

Now a female voice beckoned.  Also in uniform, and also about retirement age, she called us over to another counter.

"For the annual pass.  It is thirty dollars, right?" I asked her.

She nodded her head.

Now, if the transaction had ended right there with me paying for it as the next step, there would not have been a blog post about it.

She decided to be uber-helpful, and try to save me some money.

"There is one even better, for only ten dollars" she said and asked for my credit card.

Noticing that I hadn't signed on the back of the card, she asked for my ID.

As I handed my ID, there was a momentary pause from which she quickly recovered.  "So, in about twelve years, when you turn 62, you will be able to buy this for only ten dollars."

You see, ladies and gentlemen, until she saw my ID, she was merrily working with what she thought was an obvious fact--that I was an old fart, at least 62 years old, if not older than that.  Which is why she was all set to get me that ten-dollar deal.

Hey, stop laughing. This is not funny!

It is strange that a clerk at a store wanted to give me senior-citizen discount because of her logic: "You have all this white hair all over."  And that was three years ago--you do the math on how young I was!
Then there was that barber who was convinced that I am retired.
A few days ago, when chatting with a neighbor on the bike-path, he asked me, "how close are you to retirement, Sriram?"  He perhaps thought he was asking me very politely!

What the hell!

Anyway, I ended up paying for the thirty-dollar pass.

After a day spent hiking and sweating, in the evening I checked my mailbox.  Apparently the joke continued, for this was in the day's mail:

Stop laughing, will ya!