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Please understand me. Just because you use a key for whatever key-purpose for which you would use said or otherwise unsaid key, doesn’t mean that you are necessarily a sissy. But in my personal opinion, for which I am only mostly responsible … until further notice, I think that it’s a little sissy for me to use a key. Why? Because in our high-tech world of frivolous gadgets, the traditional metal key is such an ancient way to unlock stuff. Give me a laser signature, voice recognizer, fingerprint reader, retina scanner, DNA decoder, dental record analyzer, or, better yet, an OpenID-compatible login field, and I’ll be happy. But a key?

One evening, I decided to try these new technologies in my own home. Having my vast array of culinary skills, I threw a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner. Instead of staring into the oven window gazing longingly at my food—which, by the way, does not harm your eyes like staring into a microwave does because an oven is much slower than a microwave, so your eyesight dies much slower—I went outside to open my pool for the upcoming summer.

I have to admit here that I’m a geek. But you could probably already tell. I almost always have at least two items with LCD screens and wireless capabilities at all time. Perhaps my electronics give me a sense of security. And it’s that sense of security that makes me dislike traditional keys. So this particular evening, my technical arrogance prompted me to walk outside and proclaim to the world my independence from old-fashioned things like keys … by forgetting to unlock my door handle and leaving my key inside, and all of those cool, high-tech ways of unlocking stuff back at their respective retailers.

Yes, I was locked out.

I once read in one of those cute “life’s lessons” booklets something like this, “Give a house key to three of your friends. If you can’t trust them with a house key, get new friends.” So that is exactly what I did. I ditched all of my friends and got a great deal on some preowned models down at Goodwill—oh wait. Wrong thing. No, I really did give a key to a couple friends. (If I didn’t give one to you, then, well, maybe I was out of keys, or maybe I’m still carrying it in my pocket like I did for four months to give to another of my friends, or maybe I have some other good reason, which a real friend really would not ask about anyway.)

I called one of these friends who drives past my neighborhood on his way home from work. He said he could certainly help, and that he was fifteen minutes away. Perfect. I thought, because my pizza had about seventeen minutes to go. I’d get into the house just in time to pull the hot cheese pizza out of the oven.

Unfortunately, my friend was asked to “briefly” help someone else. That took ten minutes. By the time he did get to my house, my pizza was a charcoal-flavored chip.

Since that event, I have never locked myself out of the house again. But I still secure my house well enough that I can’t get in without a key, which was recently tested by a former housemate who locked himself out and had to wait until I got back home at 11:30 PM to get back in and go to bed.

Thus, old-fashioned means call for old-fashion techniques. I now have some keys hidden in convenient places that I can access. Go ahead and try to find it.

Um … no. That wasn’t it. Yes, that is real doggy poo. And ancient Chinese proverb say, “Man with doggy poo on hands not worthy of trust.” So no house key for you!