Obsolete skills

Roller skate keys

Where’s the beef?!!

1. manually clicking over to pick up someone on the other line of the phone.
2. paying attention to how hard you hit your brakes.
3. pinball. real pinball.
4. presets on an old car radio

I’ve got one genuinely obsolete skill. I know how to adjust and repair all the old purely mechanical (non-electric, non-electronic) vending machines.

Laugh…reading through these comments that contradict your list…methinks its evidence of the looooooooong tail!

I enjoyed reading this. Check out this site…
http://www.carlsonestopmall.com

Rabbit ears are back with HDTV

The Dewey Decimal System is alive and well in Australia, but drive-ins are long gone, and I haven’t seen a rotary phone in decades.

This list is halfway to idiotic. It represents the can’t-do list of a couple of coastal American white boy geeks who live in a tiny world whose world is limited to the computer screen. These people think they are in some position to declare something obsolete because they themselves don’t use a skill in their tiny, uniformed world? Can you spell h-u-b-r-i-s or is that obsolete? The skills on the list that are truly obsolete are limited to the flash-in-the-pan world of computers. The rest are things the boys are just not familiar with. Duh.

I’m raising teenagers here in america, and am embarrassed to admit that since velcro replaced laces/grommets, my daughter took her time learning how to tie her shoes. When I was a youngster, that was an acknowledged mileston.
Also, my kids, until they were fairly old, would double check an analog clock with a digital. They stiil aren’t comfortable with the “to” or “til” side of the clock. It’s 9:45, NOT a quarter to ten. Yikes. And these kids have brains the size of planets, excellent teachers, and two old fart engineers for parents!

how about kickstarting a motorcycle? rapidly going out of style this one.

Proficient in both Freehand and Pagemaker…

HMK

@87 Tuning a crystal set radio. Most of you do not even know what I am talking about since that was about 82 years ago. Enjoyed the comments.

I have a rotary phone in my living room…I rarely use it, the cordless gets all the attention. It still works just great! I hated it as a teenager we were the only people I knew who owned one. We keep it around as a conversation piece, and my kids think it’s funny.

Geez.

Fishing? Do you know how to design, build and repair a boat? Make fishing line from animal gut? Carve hooks? Make a stone or metal tool to carve the hook with?

Cooking with charcoal for 11 days :rolleyes:? Do you know how to make charcoal?

Do you plan to eat anything but fish and meat, or do you know how to sustainably garden? Do you know how to make hunting weapons?

What about digging a safe well? Constructing a pump? Making pots to cook food and purify water? Making baskets to gather food?

Tanning animal hides? Retting or combing, spinning and weaving fibers?

It’s amazing what passes for “survival skills” among people who’ve never had to do it for more than a couple of days. I guarantee you each one of the skills on this list takes more than “a few hours” to learn.

thats it, brother

For some of poorer folks who couldn’t afford a mimeograph machine, there was the hektograph. You bought a can of this liquid you poured into a large, flat dish and it gelled. Then you used an indelible pencil or a spirit master on a typewriter and made an original. This was “blotted” onto the surface of the gel and subquent sheets of blank paper were pressed onto this transferred image in the gel to create your copies. Slow, crude and CHEAP! I remember using this thing every year when as a kid, Dad sent out reminder cards to members of the community to send in their dues for the volunteer fire department. You could by the gel liquid at office supply stores.

Dean

Just a quick note to let you know I was very much inspired by this posting, just last friday I launched a Dutch wiki with obsolote skills, http://www.nuttelozevaardigheden.nl