Maybe if I can figure out a way to erase useless knowledge and defrag my brain, I can finally actually remember how to take screen shots.
Here is some of the information I will be happy to sacrifice:
slide rules--at one of my first jobs I told a co-worker, only a few years younger than me, that my husband was in the last class at his school that used slide rules. "Katharine," my co-worker said, "what's a slide rule?"
carriage returns--fast forward 20 years. I was explaining to another co-worker how to execute some command. "Hit carriage return," I said. Her blank stare was a bleak reminder of how much of what I learned in my youth is now clogging my brain.
shave and a haircut--yesterday I tried again to explain to yet another co-worker how clever my tag line was, pointing out that her product costs six bits a week. "I don't get it," she said. Okay, I understand that many people do not know that a bit is 12.5 cents, but the well-educated men on whom I have tested the line find it quite droll. So I explained about pieces of eight adding up to a dollar. "I know that, I know that," she said.
Finally, the light dawned. "Have you never heard the song Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits?" I asked. The line depends on the song.
She never had. All I can say is that the loss of a common culture makes life a lot harder for marketers.
7 comments:
On second thought, I don't believe I need a diskclean, just a registry cleaning. http://registry-cleaner.comodo.com/index.html
Katharine, that was very rude. Even for you. Consider talking about your coworkers 20 years later - not while you work with them.
I suppose to be a smart person does not mean to be a well liked person.
Go figure.
Anonymous, what is rude about saying that a lot of the things that I learned when I was younger are irrelevant today?
"Shave and a haircut" is not an effective tagline if no one understands that it refers back to a song. Clearly, few people do. Too bad for me--if it's not popular enough I can't piggyback on it to promote the product. I need to come up with a new idea from scratch.
That said, I appreciate your visiting this blog and leaving feedback.
Cleaning your brain is like cleaning your closet. As soon as you've tossed that twenty-year-old garment, it will come back into style. After all, everything old becomes new again.
Just last week, I heard "shave and a haircut, two bits" in conversation. It describes a distinctive knock on your door.
And just as you thought we'd wiped a word from the vocabulary -- Marconi described his radio as wireless -- the word comes back to daily use.
We don't need to eliminate the old knowledge, just compress and archive it.
I often wonder why I retain knowledge about seemingly trivial things. I haven't heard the expression "carriage return" in, oh, 20 years. But instantly, it evoked memories of TYPING papers in college.
I love how a certain little phrase will jog a memory you had forgotten.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
My vote is for defragging btw. I found it makes my hard drive much more efficient. It's like organizing your closet instead of throwing things out.
If you figure out how to do that to your brain, please post!!
But how shall Your Royal Highness travel if her carriage does not return?
Katharine - you are so right. My expression again, went blank, when reading that. I'm sure you explained it to me at the time, as you were always patient explaining to me things I did not know. However, if you were to use that expression in an effort to market a product/service to someone my age, it would most likely be a failed effort.
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