To those of you who normally drop by for the hawt chastity porn, the pictures of hawt BBW models, the hawt pictures of Marina Sirtis, or the cool conversations: I’m not offering anything like that in this admittedly longish post. But I do hope that you’ll take a few minutes to read this because, while it’s not sexy on the surface, it does concern a more serious issue.
This is a detective story, one that you will not see on some TV drama show because few people will understand the implications. But it’s because of my informal education — not any special training — that there is a story at all.
Although you’d never suspect if from the skyline of office buildings and the endless shopping centers, the area around the Elm City has a number of small, old-school shops. Not chain drugstore shops, but small businesses that house little manufacturing, repair, and contracting facilities. I’ve been fortunate to have grown up in and around so many small businesses, in which I’ve seen all sorts of occupations from watch repair, to jewelry making, to upholstery, to shoe repair, to specialized machining. Sometimes, when I was younger, I would spend afternoons just hanging out, watching, or even helping when I could. I’ve repaired antique radios (the kind with tubes!), made and repaired jewelry, watched fabric being bought and sold, and even some furniture and cabinets being built. This background has given me an unusual perspective on the idea of quality. As our society has moved from industries which actually made things to industries that trade on information, I think that we have lost the ability to discern quality in material things, simply because we no longer have any feel for them, nor any idea of how things are made.
The idea of discernment — the ability to tell what’s important — is something that we are bombarded with in ads and commercials all the time; but what the marketers are really counting on is that we, as a society, have lost the ability to discern quality merchandise. They are hoping that, in not knowing the difference, we will simply buy what they throw at us, because their commercials are funnier, sexier, or more relevant. And in fact, fewer people than ever in the US and UK really understand how things are made, where they come from, and what kind of effort is needed. This is why reality shows like “Dirty Jobs,” “Ice Road Truckers,” “The Deadliest Catch,” and even “Extreme Home Makeovers” are so fascinating to us, most of us really don’t know how anything is built or produced anymore.
I don’t have any special skills, but I did pay attention to the older relatives, the neighbors, and the people that I met in those little shops. You might wonder what possible use it would have been, cluttering up my brain with seemingly useless trivia, but there have been times when it has been useful. For example, back in the 1980s, a friend showed up at our nightspot flashing a new-looking Rolex, which he claimed to have picked up “gray market” for only $1,500. Examining it, I handed it back to him and explained that this particular model was supposed to be self-winding, but that if you felt it carefully, you couldn’t feel or hear the counterweight that does the internal winding. Not that it mattered because mechanical watches have a sweep, i.e., a constantly moving second hand. His second hand made discrete movements each second, tick…tick…tick. What he had bought was a very nice case with a $10 Japanese movement.
Oddly, he was not pleased at my display of knowledge.
