Old-world skillz

I do not know how Michael Leddy finds so many great items for his Orange Crate Art blog. I was struck by his link to this column by The Providence Journal's Mark Pantinkin on certain specialized life skills we (of a certain generation) accrued growing up that aren't needed in this day and age. There's a hint of grumpy old man in his tone, but not too much.

Some of the skills on Pantinkin's list overlaps with mine: the high-beam toggle on the floor, the rotary dial phone, threading the film in the camera, using coat hangars (and aluminum foil!) to improve TV reception, and dropping the phonograph needle on a turning record.

My own modest list would include:

• Black and white darkroom skills, especially threading the film, in the dark, onto wire reels that I then dumped into the fixative. If the film touched itself along that spiral, the outcome was just ugly.
• Using a pencil to re-wind slack cassette tape onto its spool.
• Affixing labels to 3.5-inch floppy disks.
• Creatively naming computer files within the 8.3 scheme.
• Using a proportion wheel to size photos for a newspaper page -- and keeping your distance from the hot wax machine.
• Inking and running my dad's offset printing presses, and then running the pages through the collator, folding machine, and stapler. I can still hear and feel the loud, mechanical rhythm and sounds of those machines.

But that said, some skills have not passed away from this ever-progressing world:

• The Frugal Liz prefers her $20 Whirley-Pop over any microwave popcorn.
• I still write letters and cards to my friends, and Simpsons stamps are preferred.
• Banjo strings still go on by hand one peg at a time.
• A safety pin keeps paired socks together in the wash.
• The Sunday funnies, even in their sadly depleted state (the News & Observer only has 4 pages of strips run really small), still make fun birthday gift wrapping in a pinch.
• We still have two-stroke lawnmower engines, shoelaces, eyeglass screws, and other physical artifacts of the daily world that will require specialized skills for a while yet.

I would add, though, a few new skills I've picked up:

• Working with blog software
• Using Snopes.com to sniff out urban myths forwarded to me by well-meaning people
• Navigating Gmail using the keyboard shortcuts only
• Seeing Netflix movies over my wi-fi connection (instant gratification -- though I do miss the Mom and Pop video stores)
• And, alas, becoming better than I want to be at troubleshooting Windows and Macintosh computers

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