The Junkyard Car

Jim's eyes gleamed when he said, I’m going to the auto show in Raleigh.”

A passing friend asked him, “What are you going there to see?”

Jim said “I want to see it all”.

I said “When I was a girl, every high school boy scrimped to buy an old junk car; they spent the remaining years of high school fixing it up, making it run, and keeping it running.”

Both men nodded.  The passing friend said, “I got a car from the junkyard; it didn’t even have a body.”

Every boy then wanted a car for some freedom from parental control, some social esteem and something to obsess about.  They also wanted to go places

Nowadays the car’s computer makes life easier for the dealer.  It tells the dealer’s computer what is wrong with the car.  It doesn’t tell the high school boy how to find out what is wrong with the car. 
 

The junker was a great educational tool.  It taught the boy problem solving.  It taught the boy mechanics.  It taught the boy aesthetics.  It taught the boy thrift; he was always saving to buy a wanted or needed part, if only from the junkyard.  It taught the boy how to cooperate; friends were needed to help get the motor back in the car.  It taught the boy how to talk to girls (in those days canny girls knew to be interested in cars).  Today's youth are deprived.

For a little while the computer supplanted the junker.  In the early 90s, when I wanted a computer, I bought two at a UVA property auction; they were very cheap.  Neither one had a hard drive.  I bought two hard drives over the internet and learned how to put hard drives in the computers with internet instructions.  When you’ve got two very cheap computers, you don’t worry about frying one of them.  I kept one computer and gave the other to a friend.  In those days computers were much easier to fix up than junk cars.  You could see where everything plugged in.  My success in putting in hard drives made me fearless.  Plugging odd cards into the motherboard followed hard on the heels of the hard drives.

Computers are now too skinny for anyone's fat fingers to work with anymore. They control everything.  The phone is a computer, The vacuum cleaner is a robot, for goodness sake!  Home systems are run by computers; some houses won’t go without their computers.  The map is computerized.  Computers aren’t for amateurs anymore.

The only thing left for the young person is programming.  Programming teaches logic and It’s loads of fun to make a machine do something that you want it to do.  The problem is that programming is just verbal.  It doesn’t teach a person how to do anything real, anything physical.

It is time to save our youth!  It is time to educate our youth!  It is time to bring back the computerless car.  It is time to open the junkyards to scavengers again.  It is time for popular mechanics to advertise do-it-yourself automobile kits, if popular mechanics still exists.  Bring back the automobile that has no computer!