You Know You Are Old When

[goeduck]

Our old power washer dishwasher ate the edges of our Corelle dishes. We still see our pattern in 2nd had stores.

Can I interest you in a pressure reducing valve? As it is you probably have no use for a pressure washer.

 

[goeduck]

Do you guys remember being kids in the summer and after dinner the only rule was “to be home when the street lights came on”?

I would have had to walk 8 miles to find a streetlight and then not have enough daylight to make it back home.

 

[newbury]

I have another - when you were kids what was your Dad’s “go to” punishment for bad behavior?

Most memorable -
We had a pair of Lombardy poplar trees about 60 foot apart about 30 foot from the kitchen.
My dad had saved some rocks (20 to 30lbs) from making a garden in the Vermont glacial till. Nice smooth surfaces. About 20 of them. He placed them at the base of one. For a few years when we were about 6yrs old to 10 a punishment was move the rocks from one tree base to the other.

 

[MoKelly]

I would have had to walk 8 miles to find a streetlight and then not have enough daylight to make it back home.

Yep - this was most certainly a city thing.

 

[sixdogs]

Most memorable -
We had a pair of Lombardy poplar trees about 60 foot apart about 30 foot from the kitchen.
My dad had saved some rocks (20 to 30lbs) from making a garden in the Vermont glacial till. Nice smooth surfaces. About 20 of them. He placed them at the base of one. For a few years when we were about 6yrs old to 10 a punishment was move the rocks from one tree base to the other.

Must have been a military man to move rocks from one place to another.

 

[JethroB]

I have another - when you were kids what was your Dad’s “go to” punishment for bad behavior?

For us, we had to kneel down on the floor by the stairs. Hardwood floor.

Try that for 15 minutes!!

My kids had it easy —- time out in their bedroom.

Dad was the heavy artillery, he was only summoned on rare occasions. With his belt. But he could give us kids a look that would make us shiver.

 

[WinterDeere]

Dad was the heavy artillery, he was only summoned on rare occasions. With his belt. But he could give us kids a look that would make us shiver.

Same here. On those rare occasions mom said, "wait for your father to come home," you knew you were in real trouble.

Mom did break a long wooden spoon on my rear, once. Those things hurt!

 

[Oaktree]

I'm still running WIN7, and have had to help so many friends with trying to get rid of all the spyware and bloatware in WIN10 and WIN11, I will migrate to a distro of Linux before I install them on one of my machines.
I have a drive in my computer that I regularly image my C: drive to, just in case I have a failure or a crash.
Actually, I liked WIN XP after they got the bugs worked out of it. Smaller memory footprint and not so much of a resource hog. They just keep adding more features that no one needs or wants, but it keeps the programmers making big bucks.

I clung to Win 7 for longer than I really needed to, but my hand got forced a few years ago when my tax software wouldn't run on it any longer. You know what? I got used to Win 10, and it's just fine. Yeah, took some time to get used to the changes, but I managed. Don't have a PC with hardware new enough to run 11.

Agree that it contains a lot of features I'll probably never use, but that's just the way the world goes. Look at all the minimally useful features that modern vehicles have, not just the nanny stuff but things like cellphone integration and cooled seats. Really? Aren't we trying to DIScourage people from fiddling with their cellphones while driving?

Always a good idea to keep a recent drive image.

Friends of mine tried for years to get me over to Apple but I resisted, mostly because of inertia. Finally I bought an Apple and just love it. Why didn't I do this sooner? Like from day one?

My Windows stuff took forever and with constant updates and silly things became counter-productive to even using it as a computer. And I had Norton Security to block all the garbage and intrusions.

Sigh. PC vs Mac. Orange tractor vs green. R1 vs R4. Cab or open station. etc. Never to be resolved one way or the other.
Go with what you like, but don't try to tell me one is "better" than the other.

 

[MossRoad]

Can I interest you in a pressure reducing valve? As it is you probably have no use for a pressure washer.

No thanks. We bought a new dishwasher that is wimpy.

 

[Oaktree]

I have yet to find anything that can be done in Windows that cannot be done just as easily in Linux, even if it means using "Wine" (which I don't) to run a Windows app, that is if you are dead set on using an app written for Windows. I have found there are usually several Linux apps that will do anything that Windows can, always faster and using less resources.



But yes the biggest problem is deciding which flavor to go with, I started out with Mandrake. I finally settled on Debian (testing). Linux Mint, Red Hat are also very good selections and I suppose Ubuntu is as well but I am not as sold on it since they have a Windows flavor in the way they control their product.

I have tried to like linux, but have been put off every time by its obtuseness (is that a word?). Maybe it's OK if you're willing to wade thru its geekiness, but it's not for me. Even trying to find an answer on a forum is frustrating, between the condescension shown towards anyone who "doesn't know something this basic" at best giving you a long list of command-line entries without explaining what you're doing.

Why are there so many different flavors of it, all just enough different from one another that they don't run the same way? Even the user interface looks like Windows 95.

 

[Oaktree]

Depends on the levels of security. At my old job, you couldn't do that. You'd have to take ownership of the user's account as an administrator. Home PCs are generally not secured all that great compared to a company that follows a good set of rules to prevent that.

Well, big difference in a commercial environment vs home. I would hope a business would have the machines on a domain controller.
One reason home PCs aren't all that secure is that most users just set up one account, with admin rights.

 

[Oaktree]

You know you are old if you remember green stamps. My mom collected them to claim discounts on groceries.

I don't ever remember them giving grocery discounts, I do recall you could cash them in on stuff...luggage, a portable radio, etc.
Grand Union supermarkets had their own trading stamps called plaid stamps.

 

[garry1p]

I know I'm old every morning when I get out of bed.

 

[MossRoad]

I know I'm old every morning when I get out of bed.

You're even older when you go to bed.

 

[Oaktree]

My mother had all that.
Good dishes that never got used but for Christmas, New Years and maybe another time during the year.
Glorified dust collectors.
Huge hutch to.
Got rid of it too.
Kept the silver as it is solid silver.
It hasn't seen the light of day in years.

Even as a kid I'd shake my head at the wastefulness of that. Expensive dishes/table settings that you rarely used. Can't blame today's young people for not wanting any of it.

I guess you are old if you remember sitting down as a family EVERY NIGHT for dinner. Same time, same place.

Not so much anymore it seems.

We were never real big on nightly family dinners. Yeah, sometimes but often as not we'd grab our food and scatter to our "corners".

 

[ultrarunner]

Fine China often goes begging.

I remember 50 years ago it breaking up families on who got the good China.

 

[MossRoad]

We had a rigid seating arrangement at our dining room table.

Dad at the head of the table.
Mom to his right.
Two children to her right.
Me to his left.
Two more children to my left.

Why?
Dad was right handed.
Mom was left handed.
Two to her right were right handed.
I was left handed.
First to my left was left handed.
Last one on my left was ambidextrous.

Lotsa elbow bumping if we sat any other way.

 

[MossRoad]

Fine China often goes begging.

I remember 50 years ago it breaking up families on who got the good China.

All I know is that one of my wife's late, great aunts (she had 6-7 of them) told her there were other fish in the sea regarding her dating me....

I have her china.

 

[MossRoad]

Our Corelle was what we started with, but that got set aside for Sundays after we accumulated enough promotional stoneware that we got from the grocery store, picking up a few pieces each week with X$$ purchase. Still have it and use it on occasion if we haven't run the dishwasher.

A couple years ago my wife picked up a huge set of Pfaltzgraff stoneware in the Remembrance Pattern at a 2nd hand shop for just $35. Something like 16 complete sets and a bunch of serving bowls, platters, etc. That has become our daily stuff. Looks like this:



We also have 12 settings of Pfaltzgraff Christmas Pattern dishes that we use daily from Thanksgiving through New Years for the past 35 years.



We really like the Pfaltzgraff stuff. It's heavy, dishwasher safe, etc. and seems to hold up for a long time.

And we have 12 settings of pure white stuff with gold trim for fancy dinners. No idea what brand.

 

[sixdogs]

No thanks. We bought a new dishwasher that is wimpy.

We built a new house with a high end dishwasher 25 years ago and wife has only used it a handful of times. She is very particular and just doesn't like dishwashers. It's in nearly the same condition as installed and she uses it to store mugs. I wondered where they went.

I've learned a lot of housewife-type women don't like dishwashers. A lot of homes have them but don't use them. They must not work as intended.