Have you ever driven away with your car’s key fob on the ground or in the pocket of someone you just dropped off at the mall?

Or have you ever had to pay a car dealership a ridiculous sum of money for a new key fob that stopped working? Gotten stuck somewhere because the battery in the fob died?

All of these are things that I have done.

What I have never done, however, is had my car stolen because I left the key fob inside.

It's a mistake that's all too common, police say, with car thefts up 31% already this year, largely driven by people leaving the fob in the car.

I am frazzled and absent-minded. Leaving the fob in the car is a dumb move that I am certainly capable of.

But I have immunized myself from this plague of fob foolhardiness. After years of driving a push-button start car that relied on a remote key fob, I went fob-free and bought a car with an amazing feature - an actual key.

In today's segment of Brian's Positively New Jersey, I explain why the push-button start is the latest piece of technology that was designed to make our lives simpler but wound up making them more complicated and why we never should have ditched the old-fashioned metal key in the first place.