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#62
09-18-2007, 02:20 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] 1) cash register attendants: can't do simple arithmitic, i just feel bad for these people. It makes me realize how bad the education system is in our country. [/ QUOTE ] Bill is $5.61. They enter the cost and the amount you gave them ($10) and they see the result on the display ($4.39). You then proceed to hand them 11 cents. Watch with amusement at the resulting deer-in-headlights look and wisps of smoke curling out of their ears. [/ QUOTE ] When I worked retail, I basically turned my brain off. So I just gave the person however much the machine told me to give. So if a customer all of a sudden gave me 11 cents, I have no idea what he is doing, because I hadn't been paying attention since I mentioned the total. Not stupidity, just complete lack of attention. 
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#63
09-18-2007, 02:23 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
[ QUOTE ]
I don't even know what a sine or a tangent or a cosine is. At all. [/ QUOTE ] Sines and cosines of angles are the vertical and horizontal components of the position of a point on the perimeter of a unit circle lying at that angle.
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#64
09-18-2007, 02:23 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
The days of blowing on your nintendo games are over.
Every kid in the neighborhood used to have a nintendo, and the owner was the only kid that knew the optimal blowing time to get his specific nintendo to work.
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#65
09-18-2007, 02:23 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
I think the "jack of all trades" type of people are dwindling entirely.
For instance, when I was growing up, my dad used to change his own oil, repair his own truck (most any type of repair), he built a tractor barn and a storage shed, lay bricks, landscaped his yard, repaired his own plumbing, tiled his shower, built his own deck, added stonework to his house, installed electrical wiring, repaired his own lawnmower, built a hydraulic/gas engine combo wood-splitter, etc. etc. I mean, everybody couldn't do ALL of this when I was coming up, but more people than not seemed to take on jobs like this on their own. Now, it seems that people are much more likely to hire someone to do almost all of these tasks. I'll be perfectly honest. I don't change my oil. I rarely repair my own lawnmower. I'd be hard pressed to build my own shed or run electricity somewhere. I guess people are just more specialized / lazier than they once were. Or maybe it's just me.
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#67
09-18-2007, 02:25 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
[ QUOTE ]
The days of blowing on your nintendo games are over. Every kid in the neighborhood used to have a nintendo, and the owner was the only kid that knew the optimal blowing time to get his specific nintendo to work. [/ QUOTE ] Haha this was awesome although it was complete bs as blowing didn't actually do [censored]. Even if someone owned an old Nintendo today people have realized that replacing the pin connection with a non piece of [censored] replacement for $5 makes the thing work essentially forever.
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#68
09-18-2007, 02:46 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
[ QUOTE ]
I think the "jack of all trades" type of people are dwindling entirely. [/ QUOTE ]Popular Mechanics had an article about this recently. http://www.origin.popularmechanics.c...o/4221637.html I've noticed the same thing. My father wasn't very blue collar (he was an engineer), but he fixed things around the house all the time and changed his own oil. I know how to change my own oil and used to do it myself. But it just seems easier to pay someone else to do it. And it seems that most of my friends are the same way--none know how to work with their hands.
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#69
09-18-2007, 02:53 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
Being good with directions isn't obsolete quite yet, but it will be within ten years.
Not only will every car have GPS (and eventually computerized drivers), but so will all phones and other handhold accessories.
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#70
09-18-2007, 03:01 PM
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Re: Obsolete Skills
[ QUOTE ]
But it just seems easier to pay someone else to do it. [/ QUOTE ] Part of that is because it is much cheaper/convenient to have someone else do some things. For example, I still change my own oil, but I admit it's not saving me any money by the time I factor in my time, how dirty I'll get, and disposing of the oil properly. I'm essentially paying myself about $40 to do all that stuff, but the satisfaction of doing it myself is what I'm after. At the end of the day I feel good about doing something like this myself. It's different than going to an oil change shop and grabbing a coffee while they did the work. Another obsolete skill is free hand drafting/drawing in the engineering business.
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