It’s helpful being old.
How many of these do you know how to do?
- Dialing a rotary phone. — Yup. Been a long time since I’ve done it, but that’s what I grew up on.
- Putting a needle on a vinyl record. — Yup, by hand or with the little button.
- Changing tracks on an eight-track tape. — Hmmm … I believe so, though I never owned an eight-track deck.
- Shorthand. — Nope.
- Using a slide rule. — I once learned how to do some very simple things on a slide rule, but I don’t think I could do them now. Nor, though it’s a keen widget, do I see a lot of need to.
- Using carbon paper to make copies. — Used to do this quite frequently. Along with the related skills of creating a ditto master.
- Developing film/photos. — I’ve done this, for black and white film, but not recently.
- Changing the ball or ribbon on your Selectric Typewriter.– Yup, done this a lot.
- Getting off the couch to change channels on your TV set. — Yup. Though it was even more often to adjust the volume that required getting up from the couch/lounger. Ironically, in the old days it used to be a lot easier to do so, since it was expected. Big handles, clear indicators, etc.. Now you have to squint and peer for teeny tiny little buttons — and that’s assuming you change the channel on the TV, rather than the cable box, the home theater, etc.
- Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set. — Ah, the good ol’ days. Yes, done this.
- Changing the gas mixture on your car’s carburetor. — Never did this, though I did used adjust my spark plug gaps.
And, evidently, there is a wiki on the subject.
(via DOF)
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I’d only call 4, 5, and 7 “skills”, but the rest certainly involve knowledge that one who was not born early enough may not have.
Changing tracks on an 8-track tape deck just involved pushing the right button. Since there were only about 6 buttons on my 8-track deck, it wasn’t hard to find the right one. You wouldn’t have any trouble with that.
But here’s an obsolete skill that no one misses so far as I am aware: changing the front gears on a bike by hand while riding. Before derailleurs were reliable, some bike racers would reach down and change the gears on the chainrings by picking up the chain with their fingers and manually moving it to the other gear (think of a racing bike with two chainrings). I’ve never done it since such bikes were from long before my time.
From a little later in the history of bicycles, there were systems that allowed cyclists to shift the rear gears on a bike using two levers. One would use one lever to loosen the quick-release on the axle, allowing the wheel to shift forward and back in its mounting slots. One would use another lever to move the chain to another gear. Then one would retighten the quick release with the first lever. The skill of using this shifting system is pretty much obsolete.
A related skill that’s probably on its way to obsolescence, but which is still used by some, is the skill of changing bicycle gears with an old-style set of downtube shifters without any click-shifting built in. I have done this, but it was a long time ago, and I much prefer click-shifting from the newer “brifters” combining the brakes and shifters into the same levers.