How to Remember Obsolete Manual Skills

Remember how you used to roll a car window up or down manually? Those types who are lovers of standard or stick shift cars may feel nostalgic for these lost arts. Sure, it's not the same as society's losing agricultural, carpentry or artistic skills--countless of these are long gone as technology changes our lives--but you can reminisce all the same. Here are some other small gestures or actions that your hands may remember, but have basically slipped away from contemporary Western daily life.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Recall the winding motion your arm and hand made when rolling up or down a car window. Many drivers still gesture this way when asking another driver to roll down their window. Pantomiming the pushing of a button just doesn't cut it, somehow.

2. Practice the circular motion of your index finger as you used to dial a rotary phone. There was that gentle clicking sound as the wheel whirred around, and those cute little holes for the numbers. Sure, it was a bit slower, but it did the job. Wonder if anyone still has a rotary phone.

3. Sweep your hand across the air in front of you to mimic returning the typewriter carriage to its starting point, by pushing the metal lever left to right to start a new line of typing. Even the electric typewriter made this gesture obsolete, so you have to go way back for this one.

4. Pretend you are adjusting the rabbit ears on your television set, now a thing of the past along with free television. While you're at it, imagine having no remote control. Get up from the couch, walk over to the set, and remember how you had to turn the dial manually to get a different channel. Of course, that was when all the channels (three, four, five?) could fit in the turn of a dial.

Tips & Warnings

• Ask your parent or grandparent about the things they remember doing, which one day they no longer needed to do anymore.