Thanks for the bout of nostalgia, folks!! Cassettes, dial phones, ungeared and shocker-less bicycles, two wheelers you had to kick start (and sometimes tilt), cars with bench seats in front and no seat belts, manual bicycle pumps (ouch, my arms!), wind up watches....................... <sigh> where have all these gone? And does anyone remember going up to the terrace (no lifts, you climb) to "tune" the TV antenna in the old days, when we had only one channel?
I recently spent rather a large amount of cash to buy a cassette player, because I didn't want to throw away my collection of ~ 300 cassettes (CDs, the legal ones, are way way overpriced, IMHO). Many of them have bits of cellotape holding the tape together after the snags in my old Philips portable system became too much to unravel. Cello-taping a torn cassette tape, and then snipping off the extra cellotape to ensure a uniform width - now THAT was DEXTERITY! And who can forget cleaning the head with earbuds and Old Spice aftershave?
He had the cars instructional manual in one hand and the tyre spanner in the other and was trying to change the flat
.
Much of the issue, IMHO, is because we are too wrapped up in ourselves, our cellphones, etc. to actually notice how people are doing stuff. I have this bad (or good, depends) habit of watching people do their stuff and asking silly questions. I learnt to change a tyre, a faucet (yeah, I did get the famous blast of water in the face in my teens), the fan, learnt basic soldering, everything from watching people and asking questions. And of course, I was formally taught a lot of stuff in my engineering classes.
Thankfully, I have a son who is interested in physically doing stuff and is a great help in my drilling and grinding stuff!
Last, but surely not the least, Timmy, salute to your Dad for fighting in WW2.
.
