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Changing a flat tire, changing the spark plugs, changing the oil...
Changing the oil isn't exactly a skill...it's more along the lines of replacing a lightbulb or mowing the lawn...
Changing a flat tire should be taught as part of drivers ed IMHO, simply because it's a safety thing. My wife calls AAA, honestly, I'd go crazy waiting for the AAA truck to come change the tire. But that's on her Dad, who has bought her AAA membership every year (I refuse.)
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Originally Posted by upnorthretiree
Here’s my obsolete skill. I worked in a job where we frequently had to write long papers. In the pre word processing era, you’d get your typed 60 page paper back from the secretary. You’d be reading through it and finding multiple things that needed changing, deleting, or whole additional paragraphs added. The trick was, how to add a couple new paragraphs and require the least number of pages to be completely retyped to accommodate the changes. I am a master at scrunching and expanding upper and lower margins, side margins, and taking out a word here or there to free up a whole line of space. I can cut and paste physically, not digitally, in order to minimize the impact of adding paragraphs. This skill at which I humbly claim to have been at the pinnacle, has not been called on for decades.
If it makes you feel any better we did this in school on the computer. Adjusting margins by a teeny bit, or changing the font, could get you under a page maximum or over a page minimum for an assignment deftly.
But finagling things to require the least amount of retyped pages is an interesting mental exercise.
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Originally Posted by silibran
Public libraries use the DDS. University and Specialist libraries usually the Library of Congress classification system.
I am a retired librarian. I never memorized the DDS. Why would I have to? I knew the major subjects per decade ( 800s for literature, for instance) but mostly I relied on the catalog.
I know...and using it is self explanatory, find the number walk to the aisle with that number range and find the book. I don't think I was ever taught to use the system. I just knew that if I were looking for a book about Architecture, I'd get a number, and the books were shelved in numerical order.
Also, memorizing the decades is relatively useless if you don't know if the book is classified as one or another, and a lot of them could, to a layperson, fall into two or three categories.
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Originally Posted by turf3
Are you serious that sewing on a button is now a rare skill? What do young'uns do when a button falls off, throw the garment away?
I'll have the dry cleaner do it since I have them dry cleaned about half the time anyway.
Public libraries use the DDS. University and Specialist libraries usually the Library of Congress classification system.
I am a retired librarian. I never memorized the DDS. Why would I have to? I knew the major subjects per decade ( 800s for literature, for instance) but mostly I relied on the catalog.
Well I didn't have him memorize anything. It was about location..how to find a book given a number.
I just made up some numbers and asked him to find books around that number.
Say 350 is the number and he brings back a book 353.25.
Turning learning into a game is a natural learning tool for any kid as they don't even realize it's "work"
But the keyboard on a typewriter is the exact same layout as a computer keyboard. If you could touch-type 60 wpm on a typewriter back in the day, you can touch-type 60 wpm on any QWERTY keyboard today. I'm doing so right now.
Most keyboards are QWERTY because it is the standard. Some non-QWERTY keyboards do exist (such as Dvorak and Coleman) but they are hellish and IMHO will never catch on except perhaps for some mobile devices (such as KALQ which was designed for two-thumb typing on such things.)
I can write HTML.
Also sew (though it's now cheaper to buy ready made clothes), do mental math, read a map, drive a stick, make my own coffee instead of paying a huge markup at a chain coffee shop, cook, bake, and understand where eggs, chocolate milk, and bacon come from.
Agreed. Of course butchering itself is not obsolete - my thought was as a "everyperson" kind of skill rather than a professional (and not necessarily a cow but one's own meat but plenty of ranchers and hunters still do that). Many skills seen as imperative 200 years ago are obsolete today. It's nothing new to just blame on this generation.
Indeed, in a less specialized and more rural society, the "everyman" skills were elemental for nearly every man (or woman).
Consider the relatively recent evolution of computer-skills. In 1990, desktop computers were stand-alone units. The typical engineer or mid-level technical person had one, or perhaps a PC was shared between 2-3. Software had to be loaded by the end-users. Routine troubleshooting was by the end-user. Then along came networks and system administrators, and eventually rampant security-concerns. Today the corporate "personal" computer is managed remotely, by austere and generally invisible professionals. End-users no longer know how to update a driver.
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Originally Posted by turf3
I suspect that a lot of the stuff y'all are claiming "no one does anymore" is still done, regularly and competently, by poor people.
That's an important point. People who are poor - not in the sense of Bud Lite, lottery and tattoo poor, but recent-immigrant poor - would of necessity become resourceful. This means retaining the timeless skills. The more affluent will outsource those skills to what's tantamount to the modern servant class
Just a couple of weeks ago I took my car for minor servicing. After I explained the problem to the service manager he assigned to a technician. The technician, maybe in his mid 20s, went to pull it into the service bay. When he figured out it was a manual transmission he had to get the service manager, maybe around 60 yo, to pull the car in! It was a tire shop. Nothing like that ever happened before anywhere. The oil change people never have a problem. I almost consider the manual transmission to be an extra theft deterrent. Love driving them and wish they were available in more cars.
And my kids started driving cars with stick shift.It was great because no one was able to borrow their cars when they were in high school And college.
This started on the Automotive forum. Someone posted about parallel parking. Few do it nowadays. Also driving a stickshift. Both were almost critical for drivers in the 1950's but not so today. Someone mentioned ironing. I would add tying a tie: fewer men need to wear one, and when they do, use a clip-on. I would try to avoid "hobby" skills like Morse Code. What can you do that almost nobody can today, but was useful when you're younger?
I was employed by a company in rural Pennsylvania that had no computers. Accountants sat on stools and wrote on giant ledger books held up by "V" shaped work tables, very much like Dickens plays. A centralized network was introduced with dumb terminals and an IBM mainframe with a Gandalf router in the basement and later modern work stations.
Accounting is done by the system and accountants were replaced by data entry folk.
Today, Walmart is slowly replacing cash register clerks with bar code self scanners. In some ways, my new car is way smarter than me with much better attention to detail.
But the keyboard on a typewriter is the exact same layout as a computer keyboard. If you could touch-type 60 wpm on a typewriter back in the day, you can touch-type 60 wpm on any QWERTY keyboard today. I'm doing so right now.
Most keyboards are QWERTY because it is the standard. Some non-QWERTY keyboards do exist (such as Dvorak and Coleman) but they are hellish and IMHO will never catch on except perhaps for some mobile devices (such as KALQ which was designed for two-thumb typing on such things.)
But the backspace key and word processing made the need for typing taught as a subject and skill, and as a profession obsolete. My high school required typing class for everyone; but some of us had been typing for five+ years by the time we were freshman; every book report or writing assignment from fourth grade on in my case. It was a pointless waste, I got a C in the class because I couldn't retrain my muscle memory that already typed proficiently without looking at the keyboard to their proscribed method. By the time I was a senior they had eliminated that part of the curriculum in favor of a more in depth instruction in the use of Microsoft Office. I agree that the QWERTY is here to stay. I'd hate to use anything else.
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Accountants
