Changing Times

A couple weeks ago my oldest son (age 28) was home visiting for a couple days and we were in my office watching TV while I was checking my email and such.

He has served nine years in the Minnesota National Guard and did one tour of active duty in Kosovo.....a nice place as war zones go.

Growing up he naturally spent a lot of time with me attending shooting competitions, but never got to any high power rifle matches with me as he was much too young back when I was doing that.

There is an old desk in the office, the kind thats been in the family for more than a few decades and has the fold down type desk area with three drawers below it, I suppose one could call it a 'letter writing desk'?


Anyway, there's a bunch of old stuff in it that's been in it for at least a couple decades as I don't really use the desk for much other than storage.

Well my son must have gotten bored as he started to go through the desk and found all kinds of goodies to look at and ask about.

One of the things he found was a couple rolls of old black target pasters. He held them up to me and asked, "What are these? I said, "Pasters. They're black because they're for use on the black part of a bullseye target."


He says, "Pasters?" ...... "How do they work?"



I looked at him with a little disbelief, and seeing that he was quite serious, said, "you tear them off the roll, lick the back, and stick them to the target."

He replies to me saying, "You lick it?!?!"......"YUK!"

I then realized that in all of his shooting career target pasters have been of the 'peel and stick' type (or brown masking tape)......yes, I told him they used to make postage stamps like that too. :-)


Along those same lines, I was recently helping a friend (who is a little older than I) with his rather new computer (he's real new to computers), he was unable to get into the Internet to get his email.

I checked all the connections, rebooted, unplugged the modem and plugged it in again, and what little else I knew to do, but no joy.....it just didn't seem to want to work. I ended up calling the service guy for his provider with Dicks cell phone (no phone in the room, just a jack to plug the computer into) to try to figure out what was wrong.

He asked if I could plug a telephone into the phone jack that the computer was hooked up to so we could verify that there was service on the line and that the jack was OK.

Well, checking Dicks house phone on the kitchen counter, I found that the phone had come with the house when Dick bought it back in the early seventies, and it was hard wired to the phone jack....which is how it used to be done.

I told the service guy, who sounded to also be in his mid twenties, that I couldn't try that because the phone was hard wired, but he didn't know what I was talking about!

I had to explain to him that telephones used to commonly be the property of the phone company, and were left with the house when it was sold because you couldn't simply unplug them and take them with you.....they were hard wired in.

I keep finding more things that remind me of my advancing age. Ain't it great?