I posted yesterday about working with a millennial guy. We were building a lumber frame with joists similar to a floor. I measured and laid everything out and asked him to nail it together while I went to get more supplies.
30 minutes minutes later, I got back to find one nail driven in. This guy was over 30 years old and had never driven a nail.
Here’s how I learned how to use various tools :
Had a car at 16. If the car broke down, I don’t drive. No bailouts. It’s amazing how quickly you can learn how to swap out a CV joint on an ‘84 VW Rabbit if not having a car looms over your head using nothing but a manual (and a friend that had a pretty nice set of tools).
When I took it to get aligned after that, the guy told me it looked good! I felt like a million bucks!
I do almost all maintenance & repairs on my Honda Elements today. Yeah, it consumes time, but I have fun doing it.
It doesn’t take much to learn basic mechanical stuff. The big problem is that schools shun interest in things like this since they’re all too concerned about making sure an appreciable number of kids go on to college to continue their brain scrubbing regardless of the talents the kid has.
If you’ve never been taught or had to learn, you’re not going to know it.
My family, friends, and coworkers all think I am a wizard because I built my own PC from parts off of NewEgg. They say, “Where do you send it if there is something wrong?” I say, “I don’t send it anywhere, I open it up and fix it.” Their eyes always bug out at that. I built it in 2010 and it is still running like a top. Since I have the OS (Windows 7) on a small SSD, it physically cannot “upgrade” to Windows 10. I love it!
So what — if that is the most disturbing thing you can point out, everything is pretty darn good.
A handy man around here makes a good living on picking up “broken” lawnmowers, “fixing” them and then selling them. He picks them up on the curb and takes them home. He said that 95% of them are “fixed” in 5 minutes by: replacing the gas with fresh gas, cleaning the clogged air filter, or replacing the spark plug. Cleans them up and sells them for $50 - 100 each.
People who have heard of this great mechanic routinely pay him $50-100 to repair their broken lawnmower .... yep, you guessed it, he replaces the gas, ......
My son built his own computer before graduating HS. I taught him some basic car maintenance and woodworking skills but he wasn’t much interested in those things.
The elite don’t need to learn to use screwdrivers. Their duty is to fabricate and pass regulations against private property rights in order to drive technically inclined people into homelessness. They are paid to produce trouble, may they take us through the remainder of the default process quickly.
Those students will be great NIMBYs, following in their parents’ footsteps.
Mom always chided me as a young boy for taking things apart and putting them together again. I spent most of my life as an engineering designer, helping dad work on 1970’s cars was very instructional and formed the basis of my critical thinking skills. Why couldn’t that have been done differently. I learned to think out of the box.
I once turned an aircraft blast gate off an aircraft carrier
into a hypersonic test chamber. My bosses often caught me with a wrench in my hand and a sheepish look on my face, lol.
Sounds like that's no longer true. Too bad.
My engineering student son is working this summer and last on a home remodeling crew. He was also on a competitive robotics team and has done lots of metal fab work. Knows his tools well.
THIS IS NOT SHOCKING TO ME. I’m AMAZED at how many people can’t use tools.
I test drove the truck, kicked the tires and finally asked the sales guy why such a nice truck hadn't sold over the last year. What was wrong with it?
His response: All of the customers who were interested, became uninterested as soon as they found out the truck had a standard transmission. Why? Because none of them knew how to drive a stick shit. I took advantage and made a deal and drove the truck home at about two-thirds the price I would normally expect to pay.
Back in my youth in learning to drive, a stick shift was all that was available for young folks to learn to drive in. I've been driving stick shifts every since.
The other sad thing is my daughter’s workplace just hired several hundred people to do basically data entry and most are only familiar with social media and games. They had keyboarding in high school but they are not really computer savvy either. They take a lot of training.
I’ve seen two recently made science fiction movies, where astronauts used duct tape to seal air leaks against the vacuum of space and Mars. Why did they have duct tape? Heh. Oh, yeah, highly educated folks. “Duck” tape is the only answer.
;-)
Girl skills have vanished too.
I know how to sew. I learned about 25 years ago that I had to keep that a secret, because when word gets out, women I barely know will ask me to do free alterations.
It used to be that only the men didn’t know how to sew a button on a shirt. Now almost nobody knows.
Won’t be long before changing a tire, changing out the flush valve in a toilet, putting a lock set on a door, changing out a light switch, etc. - those things we learned by watching our dads do them - will be lost arts requiring the services of a hired handyman or repair service.
When I was back in graduate school I had one professor who was proud that he didn’t know how to change a tire on his car - some people consider it a sign of superior intelligence to be let’s say manually challenged.....