"Pamela" wrote in message
...
On 19:20 2 Mar 2020, Tim Streater wrote:

In article wrote:

On 16:44 2 Mar 2020, R D S wrote:


I'm provoked to post this after the thread about whether people DIY or
not anymore. I've been wondering for some time, in particular WRT my
own kids (both men now in their 20s) if their lives have been so much
easier that necessity has *not* bred any variant of invention. They
are so needy and incapable that I had occasionally wondered if they
were on some spectrum or other but I speak to other people my age and
it sounds par.

I've a tome of anecdotes but i'll stick to a couple.

We had* 2 bagless vacuum cleaners at work (me, son, apprentice), one
upstairs, one down. I noted one day that both were downstairs, so I
asked why. The response was that one of them wasn't sucking. Later I
noted that neither had been used in a while, the place was untidy,
apparently now neither were sucking. So I went off one one about how
i'm not the ####ing caretaker, vacuum cleaners aren't ####ing rocket
science and demanded they check for blockages and if necessary clean
the filters. Neither knew that vacuum cleaners had filters (why would
they) so on my instruction the apprentice washed the filters and put
them back in. He put them in WET and proceeded to use it.

*One has since died, hardly surprising.

Recently, a machine at work is leaking polish on the floor. I'm
ignoring the problem to see what the son will do about it. Then I
prompt.. "why is it leaking", "where is it leaking from" etc. and
finally have to intervene when the best he can come up is to mop up
the leakage from the floor with a face like an injured puppy. (It's
about 30 quid per gallon)

This isn't merely a rant, i'm genuinely fearful for the future.

Kids today are definitely less practical.

For example, my nephew used to get a lot of punctures on his bike. (He
thought his knobbly off-road tyres were designed to take the full impact
of going up a sharp kerb and so he cycled going full-on up a kerb.) The
poor lad had no notion whatsoever he should fix the puncture himself,
like boys had done for generation. He demanded it be taken to the bike
shop.

As a matter of interest, what was the outcome there? Lucky not to buckle
the wheel doing that.

I must have been shown how to do it, but I certainly fixed my own -
including the ones caused by my step-mother sticking a pin in the tire.

People implored not to cycle like that but they only later learnt his
thinking. After that, it was easy to show he'd misunderstood what knobbly
tyres were for.

He was helped repair the first few punctures and in the end learned to fix
them himself.

The strange thing was his demand the shop fix it rather than anything
himself. It was like he had no notion people ever fixed such things.

If he didn’t, that was clearly down to his parents.