Forget driving. Forget voting. Forget your first real job. Forget moving into your first apartment. Forget true love and true heartbreak. In this country, you know you’ve finally become a real grown-up when your parents finally force you to take away all your boxes of crap.

Oh, I managed to hold them off for a decade, but finally my folks decided that they were redecorating. Which in 20- and 30-something circles is known as “playing the nuclear option.” Fortunately, their timing was pretty good, since I was already on a quest to find my long-lost college diploma. See, my insurance agent told me that he could get me a “Scientist” discount on my car insurance, as long as I could provide proof that I had a Bachelor of Science degree.

Don’t get me wrong — I protested that I wasn’t a working scientist, far from it. I told him that these days I couldn’t do a path integral to save my life. I told him about the thermometers I dropped in undergrad lab, about the spontaneous magnet quench back in grad school — the head grad student gave me the evil eye for that, but that totally wasn’t my fault! I told my agent that I had decided for the good of humanity to stay as far away from the lab as possible. “I do English…y stuff right now,” I told him. “One of the proudest moments in my career was when a software engineer chastised me, saying, ‘I don’t know what your degree is in, English or whatever, but I have a degree in Mathematics.'” (That’s when you know you’ve really made it as a tech writer.)

But my agent said all that didn’t matter, just send him a Xerox of the degree and voila. So thanks to my folks, and the estimated 65 grams of fine particulate dust I inhaled during the arduous search process, I am now saving some serious $$ on my car insurance! Who needs that silly lizard anyway? Does he have a Bachelor’s degree… in SCIENCE?

Anyway, I’m glad to see the ol’ diploma doing some good again. People say college is overrated, and that’s probably true — unless you’re a Scientist like me. After all, another 1,350 years of driving, and this baby just about oughtta pay for itself.