Which generation are you?

[Yeshuasdaughter]

I'm tail end Generation X. Not old enough to remember the 70s, but not young enough to be the target audience for Britney Spears and Nsync.

My generation jumped up and served after 9/11. We were peak audience for Grunge and Gangsta Rap.

I have very little in common culturally with Millenials. I get along with many Xennials (people born from 1982-1984), but I'm annoying and "square" to millenials.

I really like Generation Z. They've got good heads on their shoulders. They stay away from drugs and are focused on their futures.

 

[Raggamuffin]

Might help

Ed

 

[Streetwise]

No, this is a convenient categorisation for currently living folks, there's every bit as much variation in older generations as there is in younger, but since most of em are dead, they can't object.

My 'dad' was born around 1914, 'mum' around 1924. In some ways, despite the fact they lived thru 2 world wars and for some, the depression, they were amply rewarded. As they matured, jobs were for life, and they had cheap real estate and generous pension schemes.

We all know what NTs love labels

 

[Nitro]

Hello @Nitro . So nice to see you here. I love it when you post!

Anyway, in Oregon, it's illegal to pump your own gas.

I hear that has since been lifted, with the only state not allowing self-service being New Jersey.
In the City of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, the fire marshal kept restrictions on self-service in place until way late in the game. likely as late as the the late 80s.
Early on, I did moonlight mechanical repair work in a Boron station there which fell under that restriction because I was highly talented but didn't hold the NIASE certifications required by corporate to work there as a wrench.
It was a full service station with repair bays in the back.
I was hired on under the table because I was capable of doing repairs the certed guys weren't capable of

That only lasted a couple of years until I established my own side gig repair facility which was an offshoot that let me work on my performance and daily driver vehicles while providing the funds to dump back into my performance car habit.
I made real good money during the day working in the tech sector, but didn't want to spend any of it on the gearhead stuff.

Some actually referred to me as a mechanical junkie for which there was little to no hopes of ever getting rehabilitated

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

You should add Xennial to the list. It's the micro-generation between Generation X and Millenials. They were often into ICP and Linkin Park. They were too young to remember the Challenger Crash, but they were graduating high school during 9/11, and many have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am from the end of Generation X, and the kids who were a couple years younger than me were Xennials, not Millennials.

I was in school and watched the Challenger disaster live on TV as the whole elementary school sat in the Multi Purpose Room and watched in horror as it was broadcasted on the big screen, like some kind of sick horror movie.

I was in shock and didn't realize what was going on. The broadcast was cut short, and we were all sent back to our classrooms. The teacher looked scared and told us everyone in the spaceship was fine. I was a little aspie, so I sort of blacked out for the rest of the day. Literally, I just remember a big grey block over my vision and I couldn't hear anything. Frightening to say the least.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

I hear that has since been lifted, with the only state not allowing self-service being New Jersey.
In the City of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, the fire marshal kept restrictions on self-service in place until way late in the game. likely as late as the the late 80s.
Early on, I did moonlight mechanical repair work in a Boron station there which fell under that restriction because I was highly talented but didn't hold the NIASE certifications required by corporate to work there as a wrench.
It was a full service station with repair bays in the back.
I was hired on under the table because I was capable of doing repairs the certed guys weren't capable of

That only lasted a couple of years until I established my own side gig repair facility which was an offshoot that let me work on my performance and daily driver vehicles while providing the funds to dump back into my performance car habit.
I made real good money during the day working in the tech sector, but didn't want to spend any of it on the gearhead stuff.

Some actually referred to me as a mechanical junkie for which there was little to no hopes of ever getting rehabilitated

That was very brief, right after the lockdown started last year. You get in trouble if you try to do it now.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

I hear that has since been lifted, with the only state not allowing self-service being New Jersey.
In the City of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, the fire marshal kept restrictions on self-service in place until way late in the game. likely as late as the the late 80s.
Early on, I did moonlight mechanical repair work in a Boron station there which fell under that restriction because I was highly talented but didn't hold the NIASE certifications required by corporate to work there as a wrench.
It was a full service station with repair bays in the back.
I was hired on under the table because I was capable of doing repairs the certed guys weren't capable of

That only lasted a couple of years until I established my own side gig repair facility which was an offshoot that let me work on my performance and daily driver vehicles while providing the funds to dump back into my performance car habit.
I made real good money during the day working in the tech sector, but didn't want to spend any of it on the gearhead stuff.

Some actually referred to me as a mechanical junkie for which there was little to no hopes of ever getting rehabilitated

That's neat that you could have that much freedom in a job. Sounds like it paid well, if you could afford muscle cars with a mechanic job.

 

[Nitro]

I was just pulling into the Century III mall to meet a friend for lunch the morning the Challenger disaster was first broadcast.
Century III, now condemned and slated for demolition, was once the third largest mall in the world when it opened in 1979.

 

[Nitro]

That's neat that you could have that much freedom in a job. Sounds like it paid well, if you could afford muscle cars with a mechanic job.

I worked as a flat rate mechanic at Boron which paid half of the labor rate at the time, so if you could beat the book times in the flat rate manual, you made better bank. You have to eat your comebacks, so that was an incentive to provide quality repairs at an accelerated rate.


An cool example was swapping out the clutch assembly and refinishing the flywheel on a Pontiac Fiero which paid 18 hours of labor in the book because of how the repair manual said it had to be done and actually getting it done in six hours by paying attention and finding a suitable shortcut instead of disassembling a lot of the car.

 

[Nitro]

When I first got into them, musclecars were only about ten years old and considered by many to be unwanted gas guzzlers, so they were plentiful and fairly inexpensive to purchase.
Bumping up their performance has always been the expensive part, but now simply buying them is a rich man's game because of how many of them were cast aside, scrapped or hidden away in garages never to be seen again.

 

[unperson]

what do car enthusiasts think about the demise of the internal combustion engine in favour of electric cars? i welcome the lack of noise but uh, it works in small area countries.

 

[Nitro]

what do car enthusiasts think about the demise of the internal combustion engine in favour of electric cars? i welcome the lack of noise but uh, it works in small area countries.

Cradle to grave efficiency is about 2% greater than internal combustion.
The battery technology has not arrived as of yet to offer them as viable equipment.
It still requires fossil fuels to manufacture them.
In many cases, the charging stations derive their power from fossil fuel generation plants.
The batteries require plastics to make them, which in turn requires oil.
The ores required for the metals involve require oil to move them from the mine, and possibly more oil to dig them out of the ground.
Some of the metals involved in their manufacture are also harmful to other parts of the environment upon disposal.
Yes, batteries are recyclable, but at an unfathomable environment impact.
Then we need to address the aspect of that fat kid sitting on the handlebars of your bicycle when you are giving him a ride.
He's just dead weight that only makes the power plant work harder to move it

There are steps being taken to road race electric vehicles, and they are experimenting with electric drag racing, but they don't offer the same performance as their counterparts.
Some model aircraft are now battery powered and there are attempts at electric airplanes, but at the cost of reduced payload over the weak power density a battery offers.

As I see it, the green movement for them at the present is a cherry pick with an very narrow focus on their ultimate goal.

 

[GrownupGirl]

Generation X, I think? I was born in 1974. I remember The Bee Gees and Abba. I grew up getting up early Saturday Mornings to watch Pac-Man and The Smurfs. To air condition your car you had to open the windows and the belts in the back seat didn't go across your shoulder. There was public smoking EVERYWHERE, even though they had plenty of creepy PSAs on TV about the dangers of smoking and lung cancer. When you went to the gas station people working there actually pumped the gas for you. When I was very young everything was brown or yellow, when I got older everything was either pastel or neon. I developed a love of reading from books by Dr. Seuss. My brother and I would play our ancient Atari 2600 games but even before that we had a console that played pong. I felt a strange and obsessive attraction to video games in the arcades. The lights, the sounds, the colors had me in a trance. I was into toys such as My Little Pony and Cabbage Patch kids, but I also would play with my cousin's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figures.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

what do car enthusiasts think about the demise of the internal combustion engine in favour of electric cars? i welcome the lack of noise but uh, it works in small area countries.

Try seeing how far someone would get driving across the lonesome, crowded west in a Tesla. Maybe driving straight through Idaho and Montana.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

My Favorite Shows as a Kid and Teenager:
He Man
She Ra
Jem and the Holograms
Punky Brewster
Smurfs
Jetsons
Scooby Doo
Flintstones
GI Joe
Transformers
Inspector Gadget
Rose Petal
Strawberry Shortcake
My Little Pony
Care Bears
Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers
Duck Tales
Animaniacs
Pinky and the Brain
Daria
Beavis and Butthead
My So Called Life

 

[Taira]

I was born in 85, but grew up with parents who were stuck in the 50s, maybe 60s. Because of this, I pretty much refuse to see myself as a millennial. Sometimes I was even born in modern times, like when we went to the lake to wash clothes by hand.

Knowing my generation would be much easier by the Japanese system. I was born in Showa 60, two emperors ago, and that makes me just as ancient as I often feel.

 

[Meistersinger]

Hello @Nitro . So nice to see you here. I love it when you post!

Anyway, in Oregon, it's illegal to pump your own gas.

Oh, so Nyoo Joisee isn’t the only state that prohibits self-service fuel pumps

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

Oh, so Nyoo Joisee isn’t the only state that prohibits self-service fuel pumps

But it's kind of nice sometimes in Oregon, because it gets so cold and rainy for like 9 months of the year, so you can stay in your car.

 

[Crossbreed]

I also have songs from every decade in the 20th century, except '10s & '20s.

I now have Spaghetti Rag from 1910.

Lyons & Josco

 

[Magna]

Gen X. Aptly described by the band The Replacements in their song Bastards of Young: "Unwillingness to claim us. You've got no war to name us."