Sometimes when things seem bad, we like to think that better fortune might lie ahead. However, some bad things can always get worse, as anyone who has been around very long can attest.

Consider this item in the Journal-World about this time of the year in 1980, 25 years ago:

“Americans have been informed that their nine-digit Social Security numbers, 10-digit telephone numbers, 13-digit credit card designations and 10-digit bank identifications are soon to be joined by nine-digit ZIP codes to improve mail processing. Most citizens asked today for their reaction said they, by no means, consider such a move too whippy, or ‘zippy’, as one postal critic termed it. ‘We have enough numerical hash already – no more, please!’ he said in frustration.”

Again, that was two and a half decades ago, and it’s impossible to trace all the new-fangled electronic devised, numerical demand and technical beffudlements which have emerged since – and continue to descend upon us almost daily. In effect the 1980 lamentations only signaled the calm before the storm.

There are cordless telephones and complicated television remote controls. There are banking and credit card identification numbers to deal with, and heaven help the financial manager who makes the mistake of having more than one such designation for several accounts. There are Web sites, blogs, iPods, blackberries, blueberries, whortleberries and seemingly every other kind of fruit and vegetable, like Apples and oranges, to cope with.

What is a VCR, HD, LCD, plasma, rear-projection and do we really need them? We have passwords and PINs. It’s so confusing, it’s no wonder that people don’t realize that RN stands for registered nurse.

There are specific routines required to simply start motor vehicles, once the right device is used to gain entry. Then there is the challenge of programming a global positioning system so it doesn’t direct the user to some vast wasteland in Afghanistan. How do you adjust the seats or unlock all the doors at once? Cell phones can do just about everything except whip up a milk shake, and who’s to say they won’t be doing that before long?

There are cables and headphones and music and movie downloads that the kids can grasp in minutes while some of the older adventurers never do.

Just about every week brings some new kind of digital or numerical mish-mash that requires skill, expertise, repetition and courage to tackle, even for the most pioneering of souls.

By now you get the picture. Here we were back in 1980 bemoaning the fact we had to meet so many numbered demands, totally unaware of the raging tsunami of new technology that was coming up the road to meet us.

Experience has taught some of our older citizens that just when one thinks some niche in our society can’t get any worse, it’s already heading that direction. Not too whippy, to be sure, and quite often painfully zippy.

What in the world, or outer space, for that matter, will inundate us in the next 25 years?