Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

[jpatter666]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Here in the Wet Coast of Canada (pun implied), it seems every guy (and even some women) knows how to either fix cars or repair anything in a house, and in many cases even make major modifications to houses. Having grown up in Western Europe, labour jobs were for those without education and thus such labour (electricians, plumber, construction types, mechanics etc) were plentiful and cheaply available - though mostly not certified. Then I moved to Canada. Here, in my mid twenties, I learned how to change a car tire for the first time in my life at 2AM on the highway thanks to a kind young teen girl that stopped to see if everything was ok, as I had no idea what I was doing (I was reading car manual instructions with a flashlight on how to use a jack). Today I can change a car tire, car battery and that's about it. Next week I have to figure out how to change my windshield wiper blades. I have new ones sitting in the trunk for 2 weeks. When I bought them, I figured it was just "plug and play" , but turns out I have to read instructions and possibly use a screw driver. Don't worry I'm not a complete idiot. I managed to assemble my first BBQ this summer (though I have to fix the grease leak), and learned how to do basic BBQ'ing from a few online videos. My expertise is fixing computers, servers, designing multi-million user networks and troubleshooting plenty of complex software issues. Around the house though, my IQ is definitely below 100. If it were not for HOW-TO youtube videos, I'd be lost.

Soon, with multi-gigabit 5G wireless networks, my son will one day be able to youtube a tire changing 3D video at 2AM through the holographic projection from his iwatch. The average 1st world'er today has way more gadgets than 30 years ago and just wait until the IoT (Internet of Things) becomes mainstream. With 50 Billion devices about to be interconnected globally, this is only the beginning. I'm ready for the Internet of Things - I understand the underlying foundation of how all that stuff will work, do you? Who you gonna call when your Smart Fridge isn't properly negotiating energy savings with your hydro company or auto-purchasing the right types and quantities of groceries from the most cost efficient local grocery store that is aware of your food allergies, guest entertainment menus and calendar (and your vacation calendar too), or properly configured to deduct the funds auto-magically from the right bank acct... er I mean bitcoin wallet? Some old skills will continue to be useful for decades, others not so much. The best skill to have is how to teach yourself to do new things, else you will be a useless dinosaur in a mere 10-20 years.

I admit, I rely heavily on YouTube videos when I need to fix something I've never done before (just did so this past weekend to replace my wife's laptop computer keyboard). I guess the difference is that I'll actually look for and apply the video -- I guess these days most won't.

[BK]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Youtube changes the repair world. In the olden days you had to build up years of experience through trial and error (or call a factory tech in).

In the 1980s I would take broken parts from a car to my favorite local car parts supplier and say "I need a new one of these". Half the time I had absolutely no idea what I was doing until I had completed the repair. I think being a tinkerer is more about fearlessness and good dexterity. But, the process of repairing things is not hard to learn and the young folks of today are lucky not to be in need of learning to fix things.

When the need comes to learn how to repair something - and the young people feel motivated to learn, they will learn as every generation of humans has done before them. My child hates working on bikes or cars, but will spend hours learning to operate a tennis stringing machine (the kid loves tennis).

Tinkering/repairing things is not brain surgery.

[charliebrown]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

I can fix many appliances in our house, Over the last few years, I have fixed the gas dryer, furnace, garage door opener, garage door, several small appliances. I can fix a flat tire and change my fluids, but I generally leave fixing my car to the neighborhood garage. I dont have a lift, or a lot of special tools, and I need my cars running all the time. I can't take one apart and have it that way for a week, while
I figure things out. This saves a lot of money. I must admit with the embedded electronics in many things, they are impossible to fix. Wires go into and come out of a black box. The transfer function of the black box is not documented and they are sometimes very expensive, too expensive to buy and replace and see if it is the problem.

I work in a company providing embedded products to retail, even with my access to designs and a testing lab, sometimes it is just better to swap the entire device with a new one, because you will spend more time trouble shooting than a full device replacement. Only when we see a systematic problem that may effect many installed devices do we do a deep dive into the root cause. When we re-bundle OEM equipment with our product some times the vendors dont even now how their stuff works. They outsource hardware and software and several years later have no clue how the product works. Sometimes I debug there products for them.

I do generally agree that the new generations don't have broad general thinking concepts as much as my generation does. My kids homework comes home
looking very cookie cutterish, and if I try to explain my way which is the old way, I get "that's not how the teacher does it" One thing that has helped me was
I grew up lower class and had to improvise, and scavange to get stuff. I used to trash pick to get things and fix them. The other day we got a new gadget
for christmas that needed 3 c cell batteries, we only had two in the house. While 20 others were saying we will get some new batteries tomorrow to weepy eye kids, I was able to use a AA and wrap news paper around it to increase the diameter to the same as a 'c' and bam device working.

[ddn3f]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

I agree. I am 30 and I google just about everything I want to know or fix, only if I am interested. The hard part is asking the right questions or providing the right description so that you get useful information when you do an online search.

Most young people do not feel motivated to spend hrs fixing things that can be easily replaced at a low cost.

We just bought our first house, google will be my friend. Heck I had to search for how to caulk around the toilet.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

When I was young I really did not know how to fix anything. My late wife was the "handy man". In fact I stupidly felt in my late teens and early 20s that manual work was beneath me. How stupid was I! Slowly I changed until in my 30s I could fix almost anything. I made numerous renovations to our home, adding skylights, a new family room, closets, a pantry, became really good at wall paper etc. Then we had someone put up a shell for a lake cabin and we (mostly me) finished all the inside except for the rough in plumbing and electric. Now at 71 I still have multiple projects going. on. The one thing I never did much was the car, especially after they became so computerized. I could change the oil and tires, but that was about all. My son learned how to do all kinds of things also. Some of grandchildren can fix things, but many also are completely ignorant of anything a handy man should be able to do. I wrote my first computer program in September 1962 so I have always used computers and am no using them to show me how to fix things I never knew how to do before.

[GRG55]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

A friend of mine, in his early Bug, drove over the Sierras. When the defroster quit he had to drive with the window down and the ice scraper in his left hand, providing tunnel vision through the windshield. He alternated scraping and 'warming', a relative term in early Bugs, his arm inside the car.

I have always been convinced this is the reason the original VW Bug deliberately had a perfectly flat piece of glass for a windshield. With those tiny air cooled engines come winter the "defroster" was a quaint theoretical concept, and they must have known the windshield would have to be constantly scraped on the outside (and the inside, unless one learned not to breathe).

[don]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

I have always been convinced this is the reason the original VW Bug deliberately had a perfectly flat piece of glass for a windshield. With those tiny air cooled engines come winter the "defroster" was a quaint theoretical concept, and they must have known the windshield would have to be constantly scraped on the outside (and the inside, unless one learned not to breathe).

Don't forget easily reached and little fogging with the window down!

[wayiwalk]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Youtube changes the repair world. In the olden days you had to build up years of experience through trial and error (or call a factory tech in).

In the 1980s I would take broken parts from a car to my favorite local car parts supplier and say "I need a new one of these". Half the time I had absolutely no idea what I was doing until I had completed the repair. I think being a tinkerer is more about fearlessness and good dexterity. But, the process of repairing things is not hard to learn and the young folks of today are lucky not to be in need of learning to fix things.

When the need comes to learn how to repair something - and the young people feel motivated to learn, they will learn as every generation of humans has done before them. My child hates working on bikes or cars, but will spend hours learning to operate a tennis stringing machine (the kid loves tennis).

Tinkering/repairing things is not brain surgery.

+1

It's always been one thing to see an exploded view diagram of something, or photos in a repair manual....but a live video of someone pulling (for example ) a pressure fitted shaft from the bearings for a horizontal load washing machine? A picture is worth a thousand words....but a youtube video of the same repair? Priceless!

Great story EJ about the tire repair in a flash. Last July I had a similar experience with a brand new tire failing, about an hour from when I needed to leave to get to the airport for business travel. Scarcy as hell to change a tire along an interstate, I was surprised how many folks considered the break down lane a passing lane (2 in my 20 minutes i was there) but got the job done quickly once I figured out how to operate the jack (far from intuitive).

[vinoveri]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

20 years ago when I bought my first house (cabin in the woods actually), I bought the 2 books below, which saved me so much money and taught me so much about the inner workings of everyday things (this was before the days of youtube, but these still come in handy, and I try to get my sons to review to understand mechanisms and system operation)

rd1.pngrd.png

[LorenS]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

I've rebuilt the front end of my truck, put in extra leaf springs in the back as well as adding a reverse camera and relocating the trailer hitch wiring (added the receiver hitch as well). I did the most recent alignment. I also change the oil most of the time (http://www.qwikvalve.com/) in spite of having a full set of skid plates. I won't touch my wife's mini van, though. There is no room to work.

Modern electronic stuff is mostly unrepairable, and I'm an EE. I did fix our microwave, but it only required a new crimp on connector. The microswitch should probably be replaced, but it works as is and the switch needs to fit in a certain space to work correctly (alignment pins and such). That microwave burns popcorn on a regular basis, so I am almost sorry I fixed it because it's a bad design in the first place.

It's fun to fix stuff that was designed to be fixed. I hate working on stuff more and more. You break plastic, strip out cheap screws only to find one potted IC a resistor or two and a few cheap wires that break if you bend them. Consumer grade electronics are horribly under-engineered.

[don]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

20 years ago when I bought my first house (cabin in the woods actually), I bought the 2 books below, which saved me so much money and taught me so much about the inner workings of everyday things (this was before the days of youtube, but these still come in handy, and I try to get my sons to review to understand mechanisms and system operation)

[ATTACH=CONFIG]5541[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]5542[/ATTACH]

Those look familiar but I don't recall the Reader's Digest tie-in. My wife had the complete sewing book in the same format. Probably still does.

[EJ]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Despite the introduction of "The 1%", fortunately we Americans and Canadians are still in the adolescent stage of creating a stratified class society.

Try out the First Class section of one of the Arab Gulf air carriers such as Etihad. Those airplanes are flying microcosms of their sponsoring nation-state societies. Imported Asian labor nannies in the back, expat oil industry workers in Business, sheikhs (and sometime's their hunting falcons) up front. The Qatar Air first class lounge at its home airport in Doha is worthy of a visit, even if just once for the over-the-top experience and stories to tell about it back home. So is the so called "7-Star" Burj Al Arab hotel at Jumeirah Beach, Dubai. Too much fun!

Two of my favourite class-based stories from that region:
The first Saturday after I took delivery of my new Land Cruiser I backed it out on the driveway, filled a bucket with soap & water and used the gardener's hose to carefully wash off a few days of accumulated Middle East dust. A bit later that day two of my more worldly and experienced British expat neighbours came to visit to gently explain to me it was absolutely socially unacceptable for someone in my position to be seen washing my own car (or doing any other similar menial tasks). I was informed such unseemly displays of physical labour would be interpreted in that region as an indication I didn't carry sufficient status to afford to pay someone to do such things for me. Unfortunately I earned the everlasting enmity of my two neighbours when I deliberately offered my gardener double the pitiful going monthly rate to have him wash my Cruiser every morning. Can you imagine the uproar if I had dared to change a flat tire


Another faux pas shortly after arriving there was to wedge open the door to my temporary office at the headquarter building of the national gas company that was our joint-venture partner. That elicited an almost immediate visit from the manager of administration who carefully tried to explain to me that although the company had an official, written "open-door" policy it was not at all in any way appropriate for any executive to actually have their office door deliberately open. Ever.

History, ritual, appearance and symbolism. Important to them in ways the majority of Americans and Canadians, with our egalitarian upbringing, cannot comprehend. As I said at the beginning of this post, we North Americans have barely started on this class thing.

The wife and I are visiting a friend who among various homes in various countries owns one atop Victoria Peak overlooking Hong Kong city. We stay in a room on the top floor of a gigantic house, valued by Zillow in the vicinity of $30M. The first morning I'm embarrassed to call downstairs to report to my gracious host that the toilet doesn't flush. A servant, one of six I counted, rushes upstairs with a bucket of water to flush the toilet. This is, I'm told, how this particular toilet gets flushed. Later I ask, "Why not get it fixed?" Turns out it's easier to have the servant flush it than to find a plumber -- at any price, apparently -- who can fix it. Water pressure isn't the problem, either, as the shower worked just fine.

This experience while difficult to explain to a North American is typical in much of the world.

[seanm123]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Friends of mine are just back from a 3 year stint in Hong Kong. They have three young children so they hired a live in nanny in Hong Kong. She cared for their children day and night and cooked and cleaned six days a week for about $600 USD a month + room and board. Myself at one point here in the USA was paying over $4200 USD for regular 8AM to 6 PM daycare in Hoboken NJ for my two children. My friends in Hong Kong were going out several nights a week with the rest of the expats and partying. If I wanted to go our to dinner and movie for a night and hire a sitter it was also quite an expense. I have heard plenty of stories about the night life there, seems to be an playground for adults too.

[mikedev10]

Re: Today's Young Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Despite the introduction of "The 1%", fortunately we Americans and Canadians are still in the adolescent stage of creating a stratified class society.

Try out the First Class section of one of the Arab Gulf air carriers such as Etihad. Those airplanes are flying microcosms of their sponsoring nation-state societies. Imported Asian labor nannies in the back, expat oil industry workers in Business, sheikhs (and sometime's their hunting falcons) up front. The Qatar Air first class lounge at its home airport in Doha is worthy of a visit, even if just once for the over-the-top experience and stories to tell about it back home. So is the so called "7-Star" Burj Al Arab hotel at Jumeirah Beach, Dubai. Too much fun!

Two of my favourite class-based stories from that region:
The first Saturday after I took delivery of my new Land Cruiser I backed it out on the driveway, filled a bucket with soap & water and used the gardener's hose to carefully wash off a few days of accumulated Middle East dust. A bit later that day two of my more worldly and experienced British expat neighbours came to visit to gently explain to me it was absolutely socially unacceptable for someone in my position to be seen washing my own car (or doing any other similar menial tasks). I was informed such unseemly displays of physical labour would be interpreted in that region as an indication I didn't carry sufficient status to afford to pay someone to do such things for me. Unfortunately I earned the everlasting enmity of my two neighbours when I deliberately offered my gardener double the pitiful going monthly rate to have him wash my Cruiser every morning. Can you imagine the uproar if I had dared to change a flat tire


Another faux pas shortly after arriving there was to wedge open the door to my temporary office at the headquarter building of the national gas company that was our joint-venture partner. That elicited an almost immediate visit from the manager of administration who carefully tried to explain to me that although the company had an official, written "open-door" policy it was not at all in any way appropriate for any executive to actually have their office door deliberately open. Ever.

History, ritual, appearance and symbolism. Important to them in ways the majority of Americans and Canadians, with our egalitarian upbringing, cannot comprehend. As I said at the beginning of this post, we North Americans have barely started on this class thing.

i got a buddy in on a ticket during that etihad mess up - $257.80 for a round trip non-stop from ohare to abu dhabi in feb. some guys on a car forum i'm online also snagged tix, although are taking the bus to dubai. although i'm not sure why, my buddy and i are car guys, and staying in abu dhabi... yas marina...

i'm already going to be there on a return trip from south africa. i booked it in business with points. you're making me wonder if i should try and find some first space just so i can sit next to someone with a falcon or something! i'm on qatar there, flying through doha with some unfortunately long and poorly timed layovers. 11:30pm to 8am and a 7:20pm to 8am in DOH. the 787-8 from JNB to DOH. fun flights... rough layover. if first will give me a spot to plop in the airport i'll really have to poke around and see if i can make it happen.