A few days ago, I mused about creating a post listing things that I would never have to teach my kids. I don’t have kids, of course, but someday I probably will. And I’ll teach them life lessons. But I doubt that they’ll ever have to learn to drive standard, say. So they’ll never learn to pop the clutch. That’s already a skill that’s fading away, honestly.
But think about things that are just about on the cusp of changing. I suspect that, unless we visit grandma and grandpa’s house, and an old light bulb burns out, I will never have to teach my kids that light bulbs are hot. I will bet that light bulbs will be exclusively compact fluorescent or LED-based by the time I’m teaching kids how to change them.
So I was thinking about some other things that I might not have to ever teach my (future, hypothetical) kids.
But then I saw that a blog on Wired has already done it. Geek Dad’s list (of 100! I never could have come up with that many!) is heavy on the tech and computer side of things, but it also has a few poignant, nostalgic items.
Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
Remembering someone’s phone number.
Yeah — things are changing! I wonder what things I’ll never know that, to my dad or granfather, say, would have just been taken for granted. I know, for example, that when my dad was a teen, he worked as a pin-setter in a bowling alley, before they invented a machine to set them back up automatically. But there’s probably dozens of similar things like that.
Anyone got any examples?
Grant Hamilton
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the banana
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the banana
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Juel