As a young child my grandparents would take me every warm and humid summer’s weekend to an auction house in Sutton, NH.
I loved the pageantry. The chaos, the reprimands, “now Ruth don’t wave, raise your hand or cough.” That is unless I was planning on buying something. I waited with all the patience of a pregnant woman one month overdue. And, then, just as my young hopes would diminish into the stale air, I would hear, 'Do I hear fifty cents? Going, once, going twice.' The coveted box would appear. A grab bag box of gadgets of unknown origin and things I didn't know I needed. I had saved all week and the plea of ‘please, sir, I only have fifty cents’ would work every time.
What has happened to those items that have made up our daily lives? Gadgets and whatnot’s that we could do without! They are all gone into the abyss we call, junk.
- Where is the 411 operator? Or, better still, why am I ordering DISH TV while being connected to always the wrong call?
- Pay phones? Hello, operator, can you tell me where the nearest payphone is? I still see the metal abyss from time to time, minus the phone and littered with sexual innuendos.
- Hand written letters, bills sent by mail and alike; don’t bother, no one under the age of 40 understands long hand anyway.
- Newspapers and hardcover books are almost a thing of the past. I inquired to a young person not too long ago, ‘you know Blondie, and it’s the comic in the newspaper?’ She, the twenty-something, looked like a deer stuck in headlights and had no response.
- We all are guilty of not looking a word up in the dictionary. I am and you are too. Let the computer do it for me that way if the spelling is wrong, I’m not at blame.
Holiday calendars, address books, the Yellow Pages, Pagers and Help Wanted signs posted outside a store front; all gone into the retro junk heap.
The other day I had gone to look for a door stopper. Simple request, I went to four different stores. Every teenage cashier I meet with my inquiry looked dumb founded and all had the same response, ‘I don’t think they make those anymore!’
Doomsday is coming NH make sure you are well supplied with useless gadgets.
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