
January 18, 2018 · 0 Comments
By Brian Lockhart
“Train to become a Television Repair Man!”
I used to see this ad on the back of my comic books. This along with an ad for Sea Monkeys and X-ray glasses.
I did buy the Sea Monkeys but declined the offer to enter the exciting world of TV repair.
I’m pretty sure there are lot of younger people who would be surprised that there actually were people that would come to your house and diagnose the reason for a fuzzy television picture with wavy lines and replace what ever vacuum tube had burned out.
That profession pretty much died out when solid state televisions replaced old technology. I’m not even sure you can have a television repaired any more. More likely you just buy a new one at the end of its ten year lifespan.
Technology has replaced a lot of things over the years.
Travelling encyclopedia salesmen used to do their rounds every time a new batch of kids entered school. We had a set of World Book encyclopedias that were nifty for helping in school projects. They also were responsible for me acing the game of Jeopardy we played in my grade twelve economics class.
However the print version of these books has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur and been replaced with a much quicker internet version that isn’t limited by the number of pages in a printed volume.
It’s the same with the Yellow Pages – that big thick yellow book you used to keep on a table by the telephone or commonly on top of the refrigerator. Need someone to fix the furnace or find a place to buy flowers? The Yellow Pages was the place to look. Not any more. A lot of trees have been saved, or more likely just made into something else since YP went digital.
When it comes to thick, cheaply printed books, when was the last time a telephone directory was delivered to your home?
Vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, VCR tapes, all had their short lived lifespan before digital arrived and CD’s then DVD’s took over. Now DVD’s are apparently on their way out as everything can be streamed directly into your home.
Strangely enough, vinyl records are making a comeback from some reason. Some hipsters apparently like the sound of hisses, pops, and static on a scratched album.
When was the last time you checked your wristwatch for the time? Most likely you haven’t turned your wrist for the time for quite a while.
Ask anyone for the time these days and they pick up a phone for an accurate report of the time of day. I’m pretty sure the watch and clock repair business has taken a hit over the past few years because most people don’t regularly wear a watch any more and there’s not a lot of clock stores out there.
The publishing industry has taken one of the biggest batterings in the digital age. It wasn’t that long ago you could go into a variety store and find a huge display of glossy magazines featuring everything from Guns and Ammo to Playboy.
Now you might find a handful and most of the ones still in print lack any real substance unless knowing which celebrities are getting a divorce or what colour of nail polish Meghan Markle used this week is what you call important information.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the digital age continues to change the world over the next few years.
Much to the horror of people who claim the Dewey Decimal System is the single most import thing ever devised that had a decimal point, libraries will almost certainly change drastically over the next couple of decades. What is the point of taking up space with rows and rows of books when you can access all of them by touching a screen?
Even now, you don’t see kids in a library looking at books – they turn on a computer – and you can do that from home.
Automobiles will also change. They already have the beginnings of some types of driver assist functions that will take over when necessary and all that technology is going into more research and development so some day you won’t have to control your vehicle at all.
Who knows how technology will change everything over even the next decade.
Funny enough, a few times every summer a guy comes through my neighbourhood ringing a bell and pushing a mobile knife sharpener.
Some things it seems, won’t ever change.