Today I watched an adult couple in their forties spend 30 minutes trying to wire a plug socket, they, mainly she, eventually did it, because I spent 30 minutes yesterday teaching her the basics.
It’s not like I just happened to trip over one of the few things they could not do, people today can’t do fucking ANYTHING for themselves… I mean, I have never in my life made a victoria sponge cake from ingredients from scratch, but give me ten minutes to find a recipe and I’ll give it a go, and it may not win prizes but it will be edible.
I’m sitting here thinking, trying to remember the last time I *had* to call in an expert…
- I *choose* to have my mate service my cars, he is bloody excellent and has all the kit and owns the garage, I’d be doing it lying on the road.
- ummmm, I went to the high street opticians a year or so ago for a new pair of spectacles, the hight street shop is just a front, nobody there has a clue how to grind lenses either, that’s done elsewhere and shipped to them…
- ten years ago I went to a lawyer in my FRA skank ho child custody case, I’d have been better off blowing the money on hookers and never even turning up at court.
- I’m struggling here…. ten years ago I paid a local machine shop to skim a landrover head and put new guides in and new seats and cut the valves… everything else I did myself including an all new wiring loom from scratch…
- ummmm…… I used to go to the barbers and pay for a haircut and shave now and again…
I actually can’t think of anything else…. I’ve never in my life called in a builder, or a carpenter, or a plumber, or an electrician, or a computer guy, or a cable guy, or a gardener, or a tree surgeon, or a vet (dog is healthy and lives or is unhealthy and dies) or a painter and decorator, or bought a car from a dealership, oh yes, never called in a marine engineer or yacht painter or anything.
One thing I do have in common with other people of my ilk and my age range, none of us have had any apprentices…
I’m sitting here looking at my old Kennet which was last used to dress up a couple of old and abused filleting knives, a week or two ago and really needs to be put back onto a shelf in the workshop/junk room… the knives were more serrated than straight having been done on an angle grinder, and we so blunt they would barely cut butter… the drive belt for the kennet has been missing for ages and rather than go out and buy or make one I grabbed some button thread and made about 20 loops around the pulleys before tying it off… a little furniture polish and the threads darkened nicely and started to pass torque and rpm to the stone… ten minutes later I was grinding the knife edges and re-creating the profile and ten minutes after that they were being finished off on the diamond whetstone.
Hands up how many of you remember being able to use a pair of tights as an emergency fan belt?
So today’s lesson was talking to someone who ordered a pool filter off amazon, it wasn’t a 500 gallon per hour job that also had a label saying it consumed 37 watts at the mains, it was a intex 1,000 gallon an hour job which came with a 1/2 hp motor… so they’re freaking because it came with a continental plug rated at 16 amps and I told them to just go buy a Uk plug and put a 3A fuse in it, the RCD switch socket will do everything else… “BUT IT’S a SIXTEEN AMP PLUG!” they say, I don’t give a shit I say, half a horsepower is 370 watts and 370 watts over 230 volts is about 1.6 amperes, so maybe it’s a typo or maybe you can’t see the decimal point or maybe it’s r
aining in Kansas, but a 3 amp fuse is more than enough.
The fucking shite pool heater I have mentioned before, this photo is after the plug was cut off and about 5 to 6 inches down the cable from what was the mains plug, look at that shit in the neutral line, corroded and cracking and utter shit, barely 3 years old.
This second pic is the original wiring inside the heater itself, the thinner pink and white wires are cheapo steel core, on the right on the mains side they have used yellow crimp terminals for everything even though the blue crimp is the right size for 2.5 mm2 cores, because that way they don’t have to worry about the neutral and earth posts being different diameters, it’s always going to fit over the post… the live goes off up to a crimp spade.
There was no cable retention / clamping around the grommet either, just a spot of superglue inside to stick the sheath of the cable to the grommet, I got the core out of the grommet and used insulation tape to increase diameter and gave it the good old tug test and it’s good to go, I didn’t cheap out by shortening the cable either, I bought two metres of cable and the new cable is over two feet longer than the old one… in short the original elecro.co.uk job was an exercise in the minimum possible quality and materials bill, fuck it, good enough, ship it out the door and fuck it.
These things are around 400 quid here in the UK, for 5 quid at the trade counter for some decent immersion heater heat proof grade 2.5 mm2 three core cable and a heavy duty plug and a couple of crimps from my drawer and maybe 15 minutes of my time I have saved them from splashing out 400 quid on a new one, they are still out 25 quid 
on the RCD faceplate though, the original moulded elecro.co.uk plug really did a number on that, by the way when I opened it up it was all dust, wires bonded directly to the plug pins, and the supposedly 13 amp fuse still had not blown… despite the very plug body cooking.
So, this is the safest and most regulated country in the world where the nanny state watches over us all, and this sort of shit sails through all the time… how lucky we are we don’t live in some unregulated shithole like mumbai…
Luckily for these people, who of course are parents and have children, they still have children, and they still have a shed, and the contents of the shed, because it was me that took power down to the shed, 4 mm twin and earth inside marshall tufflex 20 mm trunking and down to a proper twin gang RCD switched socket, and a 30A cooker isolation switch at the house end, and from that to a 20 amp breaker, so the RCD socket tripped out for good when its guts melted, and they had to use a screwdriver to lever the plug out of the socket, but like I said, this is thanks to me insisting I wasn’t even going to fucking touch the job unless I could go the the trade counter and buy 4 mm cable and conduit to put it in and a branded RCD socket at the shed end and a branded breaker and switch at the house end, not some cheap ass foreign shit from the chain DIY store at half the price.
I’m sick of quoting Sagan about societies built on science and technology inhabited by fucking mouth breathers.
You think Mario Draghi can wire a fucking plug?
One thing I do have in common with other people of my ilk and my age range, none of us have had any apprentices…
you know, i agree with everything you say about modern ( mal ) education.
but you know what?
nobody forced you to never take an apprentice. that was a decision *you* made on your own.
and, oddly, i’ve noticed the same thing since my parent’s generation ( war babies, born in the 1940s ) in the US. my parents grew up reading and playing music. my mother was good enough that she played a xylophone recital on a cruise boat.
that’s relevant because the “music teacher” at my elementary school was throwing a temper tantrum over his pay and refusing to teach music as i was growing up. all he would do would be to throw a record on the player and have us do stupid shit like pretending to square dance. and the school principles and my parents knew about it, that NONE of us were being taught how to read music or play any instrument.
and no one did *anything* about it. literally anything. they didn’t hold the music teacher to account. they didn’t hold the principle to account. they didn’t even make the slightest attempt to teach me themselves … EVEN THOUGH THEY KNEW PERFECTLY WELL how to read and play music. we even still had my father’s trombone. so i grew up, not merely not knowing how to play an instrument or read music, but not even knowing that it was an expected skill set in a mediocre education.
my father has been racing circle track since the early 1970s and he’s been working on cars since the 1960s. he has never once in my life even attempted to show me how to rebuild an engine. he’s a master carpenter … and has never shown me anything other than the most rudimentary woodworking skills, etc, etc.
and, just as you haven’t noticed anyone in your gen taking an apprentice, this seems to be a fairly common in the US as well. it’s so bad here that you practically have to have a college degree for most entry level jobs.
but this doesn’t apply to EARLIER gens.
when my ‘rents split and my mother moved back to the family area, my paternal grandmother about lost her mind when she found out that my sister and i couldn’t read music or play. so she attempted to teach us piano.
there were other issues there and i was already 16 so … fairly old to be learning new languages from somebody i couldn’t stand. and my paternal grandfather was likewise quite happy to instruct in things like wood turning and gardening and motorcycle riding. ( maternal grands had issues, grandpa had the Parkinson’s and grandma had died around 1980, before we returned to the area )
so there’s a question there:
what is it about the way *your* gen was raised that you all have *chosen* not to pass your skills onto your children and the younger generations? you freely admit that YOUR elders passed their skills onto you.
why is that? because, seriously? that’s fucked up.
and you can complain about the younger gens incompetence and their general stupidity all you want. and it’s even true.
but THEY were raised doing the things they were told to do, the way they were told to do them. and you all didn’t have a problem with THAT, back then when they could have learned something useful but were taught instead to be useless fucking idiots.
Comment by bob k. mando — May 23, 2017 @ 4:32 pm
Go on youtube, there is all the instruction you need to do just about anything you want. Don’t blame your dad, if you want something you have to ask for it.
Comment by anon — May 23, 2017 @ 5:18 pm