As I continue to advance in my grumpy old man years, the more and more I long for times past when the items you need to use regularly lasted longer or, at least, were easier to fix. At least, that’s the way it seems to me.
I know I am not the only one who feels this way. Visit just about any fast food place on a weekday morning and there’s a good chance you will find a group of senior citizens discussing the subject.
The topic has been on my mind since a recent discussion I had with a coworker in the newsroom about auto repairs. While I have never been handy with tools, my Leader colleague said he used to be able to do some simple repairs to his cars, but not anymore. Today’s vehicles are so computerized that what used to be an easy fix is now beyond the grasp of amateur tinkerers.
Even I used to change my own headlights, but thanks to the way cars are put together now, you have to pull out parts just to get to the lights. If I tried that, I’d never get the parts back in the right order.
During our discussion in the newsroom, I brought up the old roll-up windows cars used to have. I miss those because they were one less thing that could get screwed up due to some electrical problem. With the old windows, you cranked them down if you wanted a breeze and cranked them up if you got cold. It was a system you could count on working most of the time.
Home appliances are even more problematic. Nowadays, they seem to be designed to break down right away. My wife and I have lived in our house for 23 years, ever since we got married. In that time we have had to buy new refrigerators; washers and dryers; stoves and numerous other smaller gadgets. It seems like we have to buy a new vacuum cleaner almost every year.
Compare that to the old fridge my parents kept for years in their garage to hold soft drinks and beer. My dad said he and Mom received the garage fridge from Grandma and Grandpa Droppelmann, who had used it for a long time before that. Dad estimated that the refrigerator lasted for 50 years before it had to be discarded.
As to vacuum cleaners, my Grandma Carbery had one that looked like a small tank that she used for decades.
Here’s one I bet people at or around my age will relate to: telephones. Sure, cell phones offer dozens of features and are considered indispensable these days, but you’re lucky to get, what, two or three years out of them?
A landline, on the other hand, rarely broke. You could even slam the receiver down in anger when someone was trying to sell you aluminum siding, and still it never broke.
Again, my parents had an old rotary-dial telephone hanging on the wall in our kitchen that worked for about 30 years without a problem. It functioned fine the entire time my folks had it.
I will also throw televisions into the mix. Grandma and Grandpa Carbery had a huge console TV in their living room for more than 20 years. I admit the picture got a little rough as it neared the end of its life, but it did its job until then.
My wife and I have replaced more than one of our TVs over the years and I don’t expect the ones we have now to be around a decade from now.
As far as computers, most families didn’t have them in their homes when I was a kid, so I can’t compare them to ones years ago. However, I know computers are not manufactured to work for decades.
If you buy a desktop or laptop computer, how long can you expect it to remain viable? When I Googled the question “How long should a computer last,” the AI answer I got was five to eight years.
I’m not used to replacing items I buy every five to eight years. I like to keep using my possessions rather than throwing them away.
Speaking of computers, as I’m writing this the Leader internet went down – briefly, thankfully. The thing is, when something like this happens, you don’t know if the problem will be resolved in 10 minutes or three or more hours.
It is times like these I feel that I was born about 60 years too late.
I used manual typewriters in my youth and electric typewriters to write term papers in college in the 1980s. I wouldn’t mind going back to using them now.
When I read about sportswriters in the 1920s typing up their stories about Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, sending them in “by wire” and traveling the country by train, it sounds pretty good. I’m sure those writers had problems with the tools of the trade, but they seemed to get the job done.
I realize people will tell me how much faster and better computers are, but I just have to wonder if those sportswriters back in the ’20s had as much trouble with their equipment as I do now.