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The old timer at the parts house retired last week and it hit me
Last week I went to pick up a thermal fuse for a dryer and the new kid had to look up the part number on his phone. Three years ago, that same guy would have just reached behind the counter without even looking. He remembered every model number from the 90s and would tell you which ones always blew the door switch. I miss walking in and just saying 'it's the Whirlpool with the blue dial' and having the right part already on the counter. Anyone else have a local shop where the person just knew everything?
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the_laura6d ago
That kind of institutional memory is basically irreplaceable. The new system works, but you lose all the little fixes and workarounds that never made it into the manual. Feels like we traded wisdom for a search bar.
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joseph_green136d ago
My local hardware store had a guy named Ray who could tell you the thread pitch on a 1978 lawnmower bolt by sight. When he left, it took three of us and twenty minutes on Google to figure out the same thing last spring. The new kids are nice, but they don't have those decades of weird fixes in their head. You don't realize how much you relied on that until it's gone and you're just staring at a parts diagram on a screen.
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