your resume of "obsolete" skills

[rinso]

OK, here are my obsolete skill sets, and remember it's not nice to laugh at senior citizens. Please ask if there are some you don't understand.

Gregg Shorthand
Palmer Oval
Maintaining and tuning tube-type 2-way radio equipment (ex: G.E. Progress Line)
refrigerator defrosting
manual typing
Punched card data processing/IBM keypunch
double-clutching
suicide knob steering
stroger switch repair and maitenance
repairing beepers
operating a mimeograph
hand candling eggs
adjusting drum brakes
Writing a personal letter by hand

 

[tolivac]

Yes:Stroger type stepper switches and Stroger type dial up program monitoring systems-worked on such a system at the last place I worked at-was interesting and fun-and a master control program switcher that used stepper switches-have such a system at the transmitter for program monitoring.Have to work on that one too.

 

[kenmore58]

Hey, Rinso, maybe we should get together and brush up on our shorthand. Then we can show these "youngins" what it's really like to work for a living!!

Ron

 

[drhardee]

I think that the quote in my "Bear411" profile (daveinsc) sums me up succinctly: "I own power tools AND bone china and know how to use both".

 

[rp2813]

Do you remember your brief forms?

If so Gene and Ron, you guys are Tem Chay!

And for those unfamiliar with shorthand, I will allow you the opportunity to draw your own conclusions re: the name of the character for the "ch" sound being "chay" so the name of the character for the hard "g" sound was . . .

No, I am not kidding.

I thought I'd be smart and take shorthand in high school in prep for college note taking. What I failed to recognize is that I had to budget for transcription time, and once I was in college I quickly abandoned the entire effort. I did get up to a frantic 90 WPM but that didn't last long.

I do recall when I was first giving this a shot in anthropology class, one airhead coed (it was a private university) asked me seriously as I was taking my notes, "Can you read that?" LOL

Another somewhat obsolete skill I learned in shorthand class was the proper way to fold a letter so it would fit in a small sized envelope.

Ditto for the Ditto Master tricks for fixing typos. Mimeographs masters were far less forgiving, if at all. Ah, the smells from our past. It was almost choreographic the way the teacher would hand out the Dittos that were freshly run off down in the school basement--on a hand crank machine as old as the school was--and as each student received their copy, the sheet would go straight to their nose. What was it about the Ditto process that made everybody like that smell? Or are there some boomers out there who didn't like the smell of a fresh Ditto copy?

And I too was a Palmer Method kid at my first Catholic elementary school. Trust me, if the nuns didn't like your ovals you'd have hell to pay! The amount of Palmer inspired handwriting out there is getting more difficult to come by with each passing day but it's easy to recognize to anyone who has "been there."

This is just the tip of the iceberg. My brain is too full of obsolete skills to sort through them all!

Ralph

 

[sudsmaster]

The Ditto process uses alcohol as a solvent for the ink. Probably mostly denatured ethanol, but all the same not bad to sniff.

When I was in high school in the 60's, some friends and I published a little newspaper that had exactly one edition. One's mother worked for the school district and had access to a ditto machine after hours... apparently she complained about it but we got our copies anyway. It was a huge flop, but we weren't into sales anyway. Still have a copy... kind of scary in its juvenile semi-genius weirdness, lol.

 

[rinso]

Ralph, people have told me I was tem chay all my life. Also along that line, the word glasses comes out "gay el asses." I've been called something that sounds like that as well.

And would you believe that the nuns didn't like my Palmer Ovals? Mine slated to the left, which was a no-no even though I am left-handed. So immediately they began a campaign to swithch my handedness to the right. To this day, I write equally poor with either hand. The most recongnizable feature of the Palmer method was its lower case r's which differ substantially from the ones most people use.

I too loved the smell of the mimeograph fluid. I have a suspicion that the early fluids were quite intoxicating when sniffed, which may have been the only way the nuns could have settled down all the brats. It was very much easier to do that than have to exert energy doing their physical abuse program. I hated it all so much, I begged my parents to let me become a Mormon.

Oh, another obsolete skill: adjusting the horizontal and vertical hold on the television.

 

[whirlcool]

Ah, the ditto machine!
I remember my 5th grade teacher always gave a pop quiz immediately after lunch on Tues & Thurs. And sure enough, they were on freshly ran ditto copy. Still wet from the machine! Of course we all sniffed the paper. It did have a strange kind of intoxicating smell.
The teacher used to yell at us for sniffing the paper. She said it would give us all brain damage.

Here is an interesting story about those mimeograph machines:

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2007/01/ditto_machines_.html

 

[rp2813]

Gene, now that you mention it, "glasses" would be a fun word to write in shorthand. I, too recall the nuns' intolerance for anyone who wrote left handed. I also ran into trouble when I switched schools in 4th grade. I went from a "Palmer" school with Notre Dame nuns to a "Noble & Noble" school with BVM nuns and both my sister and I kept getting harassed by the nuns at the new school to use wider ruled binder paper and to write bigger. It was all in vain. For years my handwriting has looked like nothing they ever taught in any school. Oh, and at the new school we were not allowed to use ball point pens. They would ruin the desktops, you know. Everybody had to use cartridge pens, usually Schaeffer's. I probably still have one lying around somewhere. White shirts with deep blue stains in the pockets were a common sight. BTW, the Notre Dame nuns were a much more fun bunch, although I have to say that 4th grade teacher Sister Mary Francis Ellen at St. Leo's School, a BVM nun, was more fun than any other nun instructor I had during those eight grueling years in Catholic school, and she let us get away with murder. The 5th grade lay teacher couldn't manage us the next year, and she ended up quitting at the end of the year. Years later at church she advised my mom that we were the worst class she had ever had.