Cyndi’s Two Cents
Lost skills
Commentary.
Technology is a wonderful thing. One of the greatest benefits of technology is that it does a lot of the thinking for us. One of the greatest disadvantages of technology is that it does a lot of the thinking for us.
There are skills that I learned from my parents that were once a part of my life and theirs and certainly used by my grandparents that are all but a memory for many in society today. The first skill that comes to mind is handwriting. In a box somewhere in my attic there are a handful of birthday cards from the 1960’s with notes from my grandparents and their signatures. Their penmanship resembles that of a modern-day professional calligrapher. Sadly, my signature gets less impressive with every passing year. And now, quite often I use a “digital signature” to sign many documents.
I travel quite a bit for my job at Brownfield Ag News and have said many times, “I don’t know what I did before I had Global Positioning System (GPS) on my phone.” The truth of the matter is that I spent more time planning. Last year my parents and I traveled to Texarkana, Arkansas to visit my uncle. My dad planned the trip using a map. It was indeed one of the most enjoyable trips I have taken in many years. Much of the credit for the enjoyment was the company with whom I traveled, but having a navigator using a paper map he held in his hands was delightful.
Remember when all cameras used film? Using a 110 or 126 instamatic camera with a flash cube, we carefully planned the shots as we knew we were sending that film off to be developed. There was no instant gratification. There were no do-overs. We had to wait a week to 10 days for those pictures to arrive in the mailbox.
When my parents bought me my first car in 1978, I knew the most basic of auto maintenance. At 16, I knew how to change a tire, check my oil and other fluids and was confident that if I had a problem I could not identify and my parents weren’t there, someone in my circle of friends could help me figure it out. At almost-58 years of age, I drive a Chevy Equinox, and to be honest with you, I’ve not so much as added windshield wiper fluid or checked my oil. I can read my wiper fluid levels along with air pressure levels for each tire and percentage of oil life left on a nifty little digital display on my dashboard. If I have a flat tire, I am more likely to call AAA than to fix it myself.
I know many women who are on par with many men when it comes to backing a livestock trailer or a wagon stacked high with hay. I am not one of those women. I have a bit of a problem with depth perception and lack the confidence to pull it off. There were times when backing a truck or car into a tight space made me anxious. Now that I have a vehicle with not only a back-up camera, but Surround Vision that uses 4 cameras to create an overhead view of the area around my vehicle, I am fearless when it comes to squeezing in and out of tight spaces. My mom and dad could do the very same thing without a single camera and probably do it in half the time it takes me with all of mine!
I do not want to give up Google, cameras on cars or GPS, but it couldn’t hurt to polish up on some of those forgotten skills. . .just in case.