Could you survive?

Stray Cat · Mar 30, 2013

LizzieMaine said:
Some of us wouldn't have survived as long as we have if we were "fragile."

True. :nod:
There are so many days I find myself lucky to be raised by Grandpa, the way he was raised by his Dad.
"Your hands ARE the tools" was his motto.

Feraud said:
Society has grown and prospered for thousands of years without the "the buzz" of modernity. Suddenly people cannot live without checking their cellphones constantly. Watch the news, this generation hasn't eradicated illness nor treats women with anything I'd call respect.
Which sentiment is the insane one?

There are two types of people where I live:
1. City dwellers. Totally dependent on modern technology, obsessing over their material goods, always saying "hurry, hurry, there's so little time!". They do tend to fall ill often, most of them became allergic to Nature, confusing "plastic" for "beautiful" (failing to remember basic genetics: you MAY look pretty, your kids.. will not) and ([size=-2]for some unknown reason[/size]) madly craving the "organic" food the other type is making.
2. Country-bumpkins (myself included). Minority, indeed. Known mostly for being mocked about our way of life ("the old way" as it's called). Living in a slow pace, actually making our own food.. and aware that the upper type envies us. :thumb:
Both types have their views on this matter.
Type 1 calls us technologically handicapped, lost-in-time, a "fail to progress".
Type 2 fears what Type 1 is turning into - life like androids.

Stray Cat · Mar 30, 2013

I may go slightly

fftopic:

The proof is in the pudding:

..at least, in the "old days" you knew who you're marring.

FountainPenGirl · Mar 30, 2013

Sure enough there were heavy issues and bad things back then but every person was not affected by every bad thing everyday. There are a lot of heavy issues and bad things today but every person is not affected by every bad thing today. Like TB was mentioned. There were a few cases around but that's a few cases in the thousands of people living in the area. Most of the people around here lead happy, healthy, successful lives. They worked hard and even struggled but were still genuinely happy in their lives.
Out here in rural red neck American the "City Slicker" type is in the minority located mainly within towns and cities. Life has changed a lot in ways but there's still a lot of 1930's America out here if people just took time to notice it.

LizzieMaine · Mar 30, 2013

FountainPenGirl said:
Out here in rural red neck American the "City Slicker" type is in the minority located mainly within towns and cities. Life has changed a lot in ways but there's still a lot of 1930's America out here if people just took time to notice it.

Indeed. The bane of my life is the sort of people who move up here from New York or Boston and then immediately do everything they can to turn this place into New York or Boston, making sure we hicks and rubes know our place. We *do* know our place. *Our place* is *this place.* And we like it just fine the way it's always been.

Stray Cat · Mar 30, 2013

LizzieMaine said:
..making sure we hicks and rubes know our place. We *do* know our place. *Our place* is *this place.* And we like it just fine the way it's always been.

Thousand miles apart, same mentality.
They come, they "mend" and "fix". We don't need them tiding us up, we're just fine. And the funniest thing is: all those City-folks coming, they all say they came for a change of life(style).. not to MAKE the mess (pardon me, I meant to say "change") in our lives. :der:

3fingers · Mar 30, 2013

LizzieMaine said:
Indeed. The bane of my life is the sort of people who move up here from New York or Boston and then immediately do everything they can to turn this place into New York or Boston, making sure we hicks and rubes know our place. We *do* know our place. *Our place* is *this place.* And we like it just fine the way it's always been.

This is a university town. A relatively small one, in a rural area, but that's what it is. Because of that, we have well over half of our population that are either students or faculty. Most of the students and many of the faculty come here from a major metropolitan area and are shocked at the differences between here and where they blew in from. A fair number of the faculty immediately raise a fuss and set about trying to turn "our town" into what they left. They get their way more often than they should, but most finally accept that we are not redeemable and either settle in or pack up and move on. It seems to me that the worst offenders are transients who never had any intention of staying here anyway. They are putting in their time waiting for the next rung on their ladder to open up. I had to laugh when my son started college, there was an orientation class we were forced to attend called "Surviving in a Small Community". Some of the stage whispered conversations and horrified looks on peoples faces(parents and students) when the people giving the talk started listing all the things we did not have were priceless. Apparently it never occurred to them that a town the size of one of their smallest suburbs wasn't fully equipped with their every wish and desire.

Stray Cat · Apr 2, 2013

3fingers said:
there was an orientation class we were forced to attend called "Surviving in a Small Community".

Hm. :suspicious:
Maybe we too should take the class ('cause life isn't teaching us about *surviving* in a small community) :frusty:
I can just imagine how "useful" it may be.

LizzieMaine · Apr 2, 2013

First rule to Surviving in a Small Community:

Don't assume that because we lack your "sophistication" it makes us stupid. We're certainly smart enough to see thru "sophistication."

Second Rule:

Don't think we're going to be impressed by whatever it was that you did in New York, LA, London, or whatever other metropolis it was. If you were such a hot shot there, what are you doing *here?*

Third Rule:

Don't keep telling us you love our accents. We don't have accents. You do.

Fourth Rule:

If you don't understand why we do something the way we do it, ask and we'll explain. Don't assume we're doing it "wrong," because we aren't.

Fifth Rule:

You won't ever be a "native" here until you've forgotten where you were before you got here. It might happen in a year or so, or it might not happen in twenty generations. It's up to you.

Stray Cat · Apr 2, 2013

LizzieMaine said:
Third Rule:
Don't keep telling us you love our accents. We don't have accents. You do.

I'll add: Don't correct the way we say things. You're calling them the wrong name, not us.

LizzieMaine said:
Fifth Rule:
You won't ever be a "native" here until you've forgotten where you were before you got here. It might happen in a year or so, or it might not happen in twenty generations. It's up to you.

LizzieMaine,
I should print this and hand it around my town.
We accept people in our community.. IF they want to be accepted.

Feraud · Apr 2, 2013

City folk have been griping for years about the out of towners and their college bound children who've infested the city.
If any of you old timers remember Senator Jack, he expressed a very understandable loathing of these hipster types from Granolaville who settled in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn and destroyed what once made these boroughs unique.
I've experienced positive and negative changes from population shifts and gentrification of neighborhoods. The big bad wolf isn't always some Hollywood version of a city slicker..

LizzieMaine · Apr 2, 2013

All the rules can be boiled down to one, applicable to all situations: Adapt to your environment. Don't think you're entitled to have the environment adapt to you.

Feraud · Apr 2, 2013

I absolutely agree. A co-worker moved near a racetrack and had the gall to complain to me about the noise! I told him to move if it bothers him.

Stray Cat · Apr 2, 2013

Indeed.

We could not even begin thinking about "could we survive?" if we were not accepting there'll be CHANGE:
1. Did they used to have central heating system and air-conditioning? No.
2. Was there electricity in every house? Depending on the era.. mostly: no.
3. Was there a thing like a "microwave oven" to speed-up your meal-making time? Not until 1947.
Washing machines, everyone's personal car, music appliances... No, no and no (most of folks around here couldn't even afford the radio for a long time)
... and so on.
The further back you go, the less goodies they had.
I'd just say: if we wre not going to be a human-chameleon and adapt ourselves to the place (ermm.. time) - there's no game.

LizzieMaine · Apr 2, 2013

A lot of the popular image of the Era comes from advertising -- which people forget always showed "the ultimate." Go into a typical home in 1947, for example, and you'd be very unlikely to see all the latest postwar conveniences. More likely you'd see a kitchen last furnished in the late 1920s, and a living room with hand-me-down furniture that might date to the Cleveland Administration.

My grandparents got electricity in 1941, a telephone in 1950, and an electric refrigerator in 1956. They lived into the 1980s without ever having a house with central heating, and to this day most homes here don't have air conditioning. The definition of "roughing it" depends on the context of where you live and what you've been bred to expect.

Stray Cat · Apr 2, 2013

LizzieMaine said:
My grandparents got electricity in 1941, a telephone in 1950, and an electric refrigerator in 1956. They lived into the 1980s without ever having a house with central heating, and to this day most homes here don't have air conditioning. The definition of "roughing it" depends on the context of where you live and what you've been bred to expect.

I still have bills for radio subscription from the 1950s. Grandpa was VERY diligent when it came to keeping his bills.
As the central heating goes: we got it in 1990s, but we never use it.
Air-conditioning is very fashionable to stuff in you wall, it's one of those dreadful "must-haves". We said "No, thank you".
Only when they canceled regular TV channels, we've got cable.
And, I doubt we'll be getting microwave oven.. at all.
Our choice. [huh]

MPicciotto · Apr 3, 2013

Hey now don't knock central AC! Actually as a service mechanic in the HVAC/R industry I found it quite fascinating that some buildings like National Airport in DC were being constructed in the 30's with central COOLING air conditioning systems. I emphasized cooling because we now denote heat seperately but the term "air conditioning" used to mean heating as well.

So to answer the original question of this thread; my industry and my job did exist and in fact many of the tools are the same or similar for the core competences of my job. But the market was different. High dollar ultra modern office buildings, ice plants, etc and certainly in large population centers. Not out in the country at all. For that I'd have to fall on my previous experience. Prior to HVAC I was in propane or "bottle gas" an industry that came about in the 30's and then flourished post war.

Matt

rjb1 · Apr 3, 2013

No offense intended toward Lizzie and the other Northerners here, but the problems she identified, especially in Rules 1-4, were endemic to the "Yankees" who came South years ago, especially on vacation. How they did things "up North" was the right way, and we were just stupid for doing it some other way, and they never hesitated to tell you so.

It was such a prevalent issue that you could, in my younger days, buy T-shirts and hats that said "I don't give a DAMN how you did it up North!"

One of my fond memories on this issue concerned a "Yankee" who was traveling from up-there, somewhere, to Florida and his trailer axle broke. He contacted my father, who owned a welding business, and as a favor (Southern hospitality) we agreed to fix it for him on a Saturday.
He would not shut up about what the problem was and how it should be fixed.
I was working under the trailer in my greasy T-shirt and blue jeans with an old baseball cap (just like Gomer Pyle). After I couldn't take his crackpot theories anymore, I crawled to the side and looked him in the eye and said, "The problem was caused by a geometric discontinuity in the axle, which resulted in increased stress concentration at that point. That in turn led to micro-fractures which propagated outward due to the reversed bending loads. The resulting force-per-area then exceeded the tensile strength of the material, resulting in the structural failure."
I crawled back under the trailer. He said, "How did you know all that?". I said, "I have a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering."
No further comments from him... I hope I taught him a lesson, but you never know.
(To take a bit of the "North" vs. "South" issue out of this, I note that the direction of travel from NY and Boston to Maine is from South to North.It's attitude more than geography these days.)

sheeplady · Apr 3, 2013

LizzieMaine said:
Fifth Rule:

You won't ever be a "native" here until you've forgotten where you were before you got here. It might happen in a year or so, or it might not happen in twenty generations. It's up to you.

I think that this is overly generous for a lot of places. Where I grew up there was a saying: "If your cat crawled in the oven and had kittens, you wouldn't butter them up and call 'em biscuits, would you?"

LizzieMaine · Apr 3, 2013

sheeplady said:
I think that this is overly generous for a lot of places. Where I grew up there was a saying: "If your cat crawled in the oven and had kittens, you wouldn't butter them up and call 'em biscuits, would you?"

We know that saying quite well around here. It's usually applied to people who say they're from Maine when they were actually born in Portsmouth. Phonies.

"Being from around here" isn't something you can strive for -- the harder you try to achieve that status the further away from you it will recede. It's bestowed by the locals -- and only on the worthy. We know when you're one of us.

LizzieMaine · Apr 4, 2013

MPicciotto said:
Hey now don't knock central AC! Actually as a service mechanic in the HVAC/R industry I found it quite fascinating that some buildings like National Airport in DC were being constructed in the 30's with central COOLING air conditioning systems. I emphasized cooling because we now denote heat seperately but the term "air conditioning" used to mean heating as well.

So to answer the original question of this thread; my industry and my job did exist and in fact many of the tools are the same or similar for the core competences of my job. But the market was different. High dollar ultra modern office buildings, ice plants, etc and certainly in large population centers. Not out in the country at all. For that I'd have to fall on my previous experience. Prior to HVAC I was in propane or "bottle gas" an industry that came about in the 30's and then flourished post war.

Matt

Air conditioning was common in theatres and stores before the war -- "COME ON IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE!" says the little cartoon penguin -- but what a lot of people don't realize is that the little window AC units also existed in the prewar era. Philco had a whole line of them on the market by 1938. They were expensive, and a luxury few people saw the need for when a bowl of ice cubes and an electric fan would do just as well, but they were available if you could afford them.

Could you survive?

Stray Cat

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Stray Cat

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FountainPenGirl

One of the Regulars

LizzieMaine

Stray Cat

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3fingers

One Too Many

Stray Cat

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LizzieMaine

Stray Cat

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Feraud

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MPicciotto

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rjb1

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sheeplady

I'll Lock Up

LizzieMaine

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