The yoof of today….

We had a dad and his late teens/early 20s daughter in the shop buying a card for her grandad.
It needed posting quickly so she wrote the card on our counter. Dad told her the address and gave her a stamp.
“Where does it go” she asked. He had to tell her top right.
Last night at pub quiz our friend’s nearly 30 boffin son was with them. Seriously he knows all the answers but when asked where the stamp went ,not a clue.
Sure they can do computery stuff but you really must wonder what other basic skills are being lost forever.
I’m feeling very old.

If you can get to 30 without needing to place a stamp is it actually a skill that’s required anymore?

I’m not really sure putting a stamp on a letter is a basic skill of life. I’m not sure the last time I put a stamp on a letter/card. I just take it to post offcie and get them to do it and I’m 48!

My kids can cook for themselves at 15 & 13, and my 13 year old daughter collected someting from Decathlon for me the other week when she was in Leeds with her mates. I’m happy they’ll survive in the wilds of suburbia!

To be fair, I’ve probably only put a stamp on a handful of things in the last decade. My kids have never had to do it (22 and 15).

They can use barcodes to access the pickup lockers though…

You want to try having an engineering apprentice nowadays – stuff that I learned tinkering with bikes/motorbikes/helping dad fix cars when I was a teenager is missing nowadays. I took my last apprentice on because he was into Tecnic Lego but we are still having to teach the absolute basics.

Not even seen a stamp for years and I’m 47!

Sure they can do computery stuff but you really must wonder what other basic skills are being lost forever.

Try them with an old rotary dial phone. 😉

Does it even need to go there?

Does it even need to go there?

… exactly – I don’t think it does now as the whole envelope is scanned.

(see also  parcels – you can put the sticker anywhere.)

You should see the state of the glass milk bottles at work. I swear sone uses a bottle opener on them.

I showed a grad how to open them properly. A few days later they put their thumb through the lid ?

I bet you don’t even need to lick the back of them these days (the stamps, not the yoof)

I’m not really sure putting a stamp on a letter is a basic skill of life.

How do you send a birthday card to grandad then?

moonpig

What’s an envelope?

Is it some kind of container for a physical email?

I’ll bet that they don’t know how to seal a parchment with a cygnet ring either. 😉

Sounds like the problem (if there actually is one) is with the adults of today not teaching kids things. You can’t blame a kid for not knowing something that they could only know by being taught!

My soon to be 12yo can cook, biscuits, muffins, bread, cakes, flapjacks, porridge, and poached eggs. My 15yo needed me to tell him during his rant to cut a sandwich in half to fit his lunch box.

Both are more proficient than me at iPhones.

Different era & ways of thinking, innit.

T’was ever thus, time moves on and the utility of skills changes.

If Facebook was around in the 1960’s you know there would have been all these threads bemoaning ‘Young ‘uns today, they can’t even shoe a horse!”

There was a lot of diatribe a few years back about ‘millennials have no DIY skills.’ Somewhat ignoring the fact that thanks to our dysfunctional housing market Millennials are living in rented accommodation much later in life where DIY is either discouraged or outright forbidden.

When skills become useful and available, people learn them.

There’s two kids (they are both thirty two) at my place of, so far …..

One had never heard of the British empire, said you can’t be 100% sure the earth isn’t flat. The other we had to teach ho to use a tape measure.

We had to explain to both, that when you vote, you won’t see rishi sunaks name next to a box, I gave up when one argued that you could phone your vote in.

I could write an essay on the dumb shit they say.

Sounds like the problem (if there actually is one) is with the adults of today not teaching kids things.

Which goes back to how infrequently adults use stamps now.

I would guess most of us learnt probably by watching our parents/seeing the letters we got had the stamp in the same place and so just copied it.

The former isnt going to happen much now and the latter is also pretty rare. Most letters now are going to be business ones and so printed vs an actual stamp.

How do you send a birthday card to grandad then?

As I said straight after the bit you quoted, you go to the post office (mines in the local shop) and hand them the card, and pay for how fast you want it to get there. They put the sticker on for you. Or use moopig and don’t get out of bed!

The thing that I was shocked that the yoof of today will struggle with is file management – they just save stuff on the computer & rely on software to point them in the direction of recent files.

Once those are gone it causes them issues as they cannot find the files.

(Source – University lecturers)

A matron at Uppingham school recounted to me how an ex-pupil had left and got into Oxford. Mid-term he phoned her up to ask how to iron a shirt.

I blame the parents.

As I said straight after the bit you quoted, you go to the post office (mines in the local shop) and hand them the card, and pay for how fast you want it to get there. They put the sticker on for you. Or use moopig and don’t get out of bed!

I have never done this to a letter. Parcel yes, letter no.

Regardless, surely even a late teen has received a letter or card through the post at least a handful of times in their life. You’d see where the stamp is or where it’s franked. You’d have to be very lacking in observational skills not to put 2 and 2 together.

I thought yoof had lost the ability to talk to each other – walking along all with buds in or eating around a table all looking at their phones in silence. But it turns out it’s circumstance. A year ago my place of work (school) banned phones. As you’d imagine the kids were not happy. A year on the change in behaviour is remarkable. Surveys of kids has shown that now it’s bedded in they like it and want it to stay.

Mid-term he phoned her up to ask how to iron a shirt.

His first mistake was buying a shirt that needed ironing instead of one of those no-crease things although i supposed at least he realised it needed washing.

My first year at uni, I was walking out the door of our shared flat with a binbag containing my duvet, bedsheets etc down to the campus laundrette.

Housemate asked me what I was doing so I told him.

He didn’t understand that these things needed washing. Having lived at home all his life up until then, his Mum had made his bed, changed the sheets etc.

Worryingly, this was about 4 months into our time there so God only knows what his bedsheets were like by that point.

A matron at Uppingham school recounted to me how an ex-pupil had left and got into Oxford. Mid-term he phoned her up to ask how to iron a shirt.

I did 4 years at Cambridge with weekly (or more frequent) cause to wear either a suit or black tie. I didn’t iron anything while there. (I only had one shirt for each so they were definitely being washed)

My aunt lives in Monaco, she’s in her 70’s. She’s sent several birthday and Christmas cards without stamps. That the youth understand a stamp is necessary is progress!

I’ve posted this before I’m sure. One of my “things” is escape rooms, a core principle of them is that they should not require outside knowledge. Eg, if you had a puzzle involving Roman Numerals or Morse code you should provide a translation guide because otherwise if no-one in the team knows it then the game is in an unwinnable state, it’s not possible to deduce.

There are regular discussions around what should be considered outside knowledge; there are assumptions you have to make, otherwise it would be an empty room. It is fair, for example, to expect that at least one person on the team can read English words in a game based in the UK.

Something which is increasingly cropping up as outside knowledge is reading an analogue clock. Kids are taught it in primary school then never touch it again because they have no need to.

You want to try having an engineering apprentice nowadays – stuff that I learned tinkering with bikes/motorbikes/helping dad fix cars when I was a teenager is missing

We’ve had some sandwich year undergrads over the last couple of years. After A levels and 2 years of mechanical or aeronautical engineering they’ve not got the first clue how basic bicycle components or car stuff works. I can’t get my head around how universities aren’t equipping them to work basic stuff like this out.

The actual apprentices are much more useful after their first dose of technical training.

they’ve not got the first clue how basic bicycle components or car stuff works.

How much of that though is due to 2 things:
1) Cars are way more reliable now than back in the day. Get in car, a load of sensors and lights will tell you if there’s anything wrong, drive car. The days when you needed to be “tinkering” under the bonnet every couple of weeks to adjust something that wasn’t quite right are long gone.
2) The average car now can’t be accessed anyway. The user can fill the washer bottle, maybe check oil, inflate tyres. That’s it. Everything else requires a laptop and some serious dismantling to get to. Plus things like LED lights mean you never need to check or replace the bulbs.

Someone at work was looking for a stamp just the other day- no problem, I’m sure I have one in my wallet. When I found it it was one of the olympics ones from 2012.

How much of that though is due to 2 things:

I think the main ‘thing’ is that as engineers they are more interested in analytical computer tech and software rather than physical systems.

Although the current ones did actually know how to read an analogue vernier caliper which somewhat surprised me. A sad think to state I know.

How do you send a birthday card to grandad then?

The only way I’d manage that is with a Ouija Board

1) Cars are way more reliable now than back in the day. Get in car, a load of sensors and lights will tell you if there’s anything wrong, drive car. The days when you needed to be “tinkering” under the bonnet every couple of weeks to adjust something that wasn’t quite right are long gone.

Thinking about it, I have had my current car for 6 months and I haven’t even opened the bonnet up, not even just to look what is under there!

However I have had cars in the past when I did mess about with them and enjoyed doing so.

Probably in the last ten years the only thing I put stamps on is birthday cards.  Most people less than 40 probably just use Moonpig for that.

I can understand why someone on their 20s would never have used a stamp.

Try them with an old rotary dial phone. 😉

Or a cassette tape and a pencil

I’ll bet that they don’t know how to seal a parchment with a cygnet ring either. 😉

a ring with a baby swan on it?

I once watched a very fast young professional downhill racer trying to butter a slice of toast. It was a massacre. It finished up looking like a string vest. His angry dad had to take over and rescue breakfast.

This was in around 2010 before he was a world cup winner.

I once watched a very fast young professional downhill racer trying to butter a slice of toast. It was a massacre. It finished up looking like a string vest. His angry dad had to take over and rescue breakfast.

When British Cycling revised and redeveloped their Academy Programme, they realised fairly quickly that as well as teaching the young riders stuff about riding bikes and race tactics, they also had to teach them cookery and general home economics because, left to their own devices, they would live off cereal and pasta in a maelstrom of badly organised and smelly clothing.

The riders lived in shared houses near the velodrome so it was very like student life but after a couple of instances of very “student-like behaviour”, they got in a “matron” type woman who’d do unannounced inspections of the houses. She was held in a mix of terror and awe by the riders. You did not get on the wrong side of this woman – not more than once anyway.