To say people in my industry are busy is a huge understatement. As my colleague said in a presentation yesterday, “How many more once in a lifetime events can those of us working in commodities markets experience in three years?”
I love being busy at work, but I do miss my blog time. I crafted this blog in my head while Little Chirp and I were on Spring Break. This feels to me like it was weeks ago; it was just last week. Little Chirp and I had lunch with Brainy Bird, and I wanted to take him to my favorite store in Columbia afterwards. The store is downtown from Hall’s Chophouse, where we love to dine.
One can find just about everything in this store – clothing, outdoor gear, shoes, pajamas, novelty gifts, candy, honey. I love that place! Little Chirp initially expressed annoyance with having to walk down Main Street to go to my favorite store. He moped right up until we walked in. While I like the upstairs portion of the store, which is primarily gifts and novelties, he liked the downstairs portion, which is primarily clothing.
Little Chirp purchased a new hoodie, and then he wanted to continue down Main Street to see what else we may discover. In doing so, we stumbled onto a bowling alley. It is actually a bar and grille with bowling lanes in the back. We purchased an hour bowling, and we had so much fun that we purchased another.
Given that the bowling is a small portion of the establishments allure and revenue, the automated pinsetters were not highly functional. They would jam up or move slowly at times. We had the place to ourselves; we were having fun, and we did not mind at all.
At one point, we were waiting for the pin setting machine to figure itself out, and I joked that the manual pinsetters were faster than this back in my day. Litte Chirp scoffed at the idea that people used to set up the pins. I assured him that this was the case; moreover, many of my childhood friends that to subscribe my blog can attest to this. A few of my readers were pinsetters themselves.
I had to laugh when I took a quick break from bowling to use the girl’s room, and I returned to find that Little Chirp had gotten out his phone to fact check my claim of human pinsetters. When I returned, he told me of his investigation. He also told me that this was a 1950’s thing. He knows things moved slowly where I grew up, but he does love to claim that I am as ancient as the dinosaurs.
Technology advanced so much within our lifetimes that our children find aspects of our lives, like human pinsetters, hard to believe. I often think that life was so much better when I was a child. I fear that technology is the ultimate tradeoff of happiness for convenience.
On a positive note, I had forgotten how much fun bowling is! We enjoyed our bowling time so much, that we returned the next day when our hike was rained out.
You can tell your son that he was only partially right. Back in my time of pin setting pretty much all the ten pin bowling alleys across the city were fully automated with the exception of at least one that I know of. However, outside the city limits and across the hill country there existed and still exist to this day a great deal of old German style nine pin bowling alleys. It was in these such bowling alleys that I sat pins, and later on bowled in a great deal of them myself. I have been living overseas for many years now and haven’t been back but I know at least some of them still exist. And if I also had to guess there’s still a bunch of 13 to 15 year old boys or girls setting them pins, before they can run off to Mickey D’s or somewhere else to get an official job.