My how things have changed:
- We used to buy appliances to make life easier. Now, you must wash the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher—and the life of that semi-useful appliance is only about 3-5 years, no matter how much you spend on it.
- When people got tired of walking over to the TV to change channels, the remote control was invented. Early ones worked on sound, so you could jiggle your keys and get the television to go wacko. Of course, most homes only got three to five stations, so it was no big deal.
- Newspapers were saved for the Boy Scouts fund raiser. We didn’t recycle and a week’s worth of trash fit in a single 30-gallon garbage can because many bottles were returned for reuse and there was nowhere near as much packaging that needed to be disposed of.
- Many people did their own tune-ups (i.e. changed their own oil, distributor cap and rotor, and air and oil filters each spring and each fall.) This could be done with a basic set of hand tools in a couple of hours.
- And, finally—NO ONE would ever have thought about asking for validation for their decisions, such as, “I grounded my son for a week because he burnt the house down. Am I an asshole?”
sfnowak 