They don't make 'em like they used to?

A lot of people, especially from the previous generation, seem to believe that they don't make things like they used to. And they will not tire of telling you so. I have always had trouble believing this. Across the last thirty-five years, I have only seen things get better.

My first mobile phone was a brick. Talk time was about 30 minutes and the battery had to be recharged overnight. My current phone weighs nothing, has 6 hours of talk time, a week's standby time, alerts me when its battery needs to be recharged, charges in 2 hours, browses the internet at speeds up to 7.2Mbps, takes pictures at night without a flash, has 64 GB of memory, plays high fidelity music though my car stereo, gives me driving directions and can probably drive my car if I could figure out how to tell it to do so. I could tell you about the new LCD TVs with true HD 1080 resolution as against our old SONY with 640 lines of analog display.

Sure, you say, that will always happen in electronics. All right then. My first car in 1984 had a 2 litre engine, produced about 80 hp, went from 0 to 100 in 12 seconds and gave me about 12 kilometers per litre. My latest car also has a 2 litre engine, but produces 184 hp, goes from 0 to 100 in 7 seconds, has anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, airbags, a million watt stereo, will tell me how to get to where I want to go and is capable of giving me 17 kmpl if I drive it in eco mode at a steady speed on the expressway. Cars not a fair example either? Okay, table-fans today are more energy efficient and more elegant that their 20th century counterparts. Even plastic buckets have a better finish these days and their handles don't come off the first time you try to lift them with water in them.

Here is another example, and this one is as low tech as it can get. When we built our house in 1987, we installed GI pipes for our concealed plumbing. Over the last 25 years, the hot water pipes got corroded and the scaling built up to a point that we have had to recently remodel our bathrooms just to replace the pipes. The new C-PVC pipes are corrosion resistant, are easier to join to each other, and a skilled plumber can finish laying all the pipes in the bathroom in a single day. That is for the shower, wash basin, bath tub, the commode, the water heater and a second shower connected to the roof top solar unit. With the metal pipes, it would take more than a day just to cut the threads on the pipe ends so they could screw on the elbow joints.

The plumber, however, was complaining about how the new C-PVC pipes are not quite the same thing as the old metal pipes. I have no clue what he was on about. I asked him how long it took him to re-train himself to work with the new C-PVC pipes. He said the training time was about a week but in the beginning, the chemical solution that is used for joining two sections together was no good and the joints were often not leak proof. He complained about how he had to remove the C-PVC plumbing and had to redo the whole thing in metal the first time he tried it.

I researched this a bit. It appears that 10 years ago, the chemical available in India had a curing time of 24 hours and the new stuff available now has a curing time of 5-10 minutes. I wanted to ask him if he waited 24 hours after gluing the pipes together before he charged the system with water, but decided to pass.

So what is going on? Why are pops and gram-pa complaining about the new stuff so often? I suspect the culprit is our tendency to resist change. And the older we get, the more we begin to resist change. Perhaps we cannot learn new stuff as easily. At the very least we begin to believe that we cannot learn new stuff easily. Show me a person complaining about how they don't make things like they used to, and I will show you a person who is beginning to display the signs of resistance to change.

And the next time you catch yourself complaining about how Microsoft Office or Facebook has changed the User Interface on you again and how the old one was better, take a good hard look in the mirror. You might just notice a face with a few more gray hairs peering back at you.