What every boy should know before he has his first date with a girl

[micky]

What every boy should know before he has his first date with a girl

[BenDarrenBach]

...no idea what you're going for... Maybe the asylum?

[nestork]

Makes no sense to me neither.

I think that's just Micky's "Andy Kaufman - ish" sense of humour. You know, nonsense = funny.

[micky]

Well, when does a boy have his first date with a girl? Age 23? 17?

15? maybe 10?

Well he should know about wrenches long before that, starting at 3 or 4, but at least by 7.

Very interesting.

We had a monkey wrench that must have been left behind when my mother moved. So I was happy to buy another one at a yard sale, even though I doubt I'll ever use it.

[Sasquatch Jones]

I don't quite follow the idea, but that page has some interesting stuff.

I bought my first flare nut wrench this year after 40+ years of never knowing about them. Real handy for connecting tubing. Interesting reading about Crescent wrenches - looks like a least one factory is still in the US - generically called "adjustable spanner" I guess...

I learned long ago not to call a pipe wrench a monkey wrench or you might get one up side of the head. LOL! Although according this link, "monkey" does not refer to the person using it...

How various tools were invented has always been interesting. Encouraging to see how simple things came about.

[Retired]

Now that I'm retired, for the last 4 years I have been helping my daughter, a middle school science teacher, with her science competition group on their building projects.

I am continually amazed at the number of boys (and girls) in 7th and

8th grade who have never held a wrench or screwdriver, etc before.

This in a relatively affluent suburb where the majority of parents are doctors, lawyers, etc. Daughter says it was very different when she taught in a rural school some years ago. She says those kids knew how to change oil on the family tractor.

[J Burns]

Yeah, she may not realize that when he says no, he means no. If word gets out that he's a pushover, nice girls won't ask him out!

[Moe DeLoughan]

"That's because in Europe their sex is all metric and ours is

*standard* and just doesn't fit their openings. Ever try it? You turn and turn the sockets but they just skip without grabbing. It's a good way to strip your nuts, if you ask me."

-- PMS (America's Leading Relationship Authority)

[J Burns]

I didn't know _what_ you were talking about until I realized you meant hex!

It just takes savoir faire. If you had a 3/8" head, you'd size up their wenches until you found a ten. If it feels too loose, put tin foil over the head. You might need a hammer.

[rbowman]

Guess you never had any happy moments working on corroded automobile brake plumbing then.

[rbowman]

I went to an engineering school in the '60s and even then quite a few of the students were Indian or Chinese. The conventional wisdom was while most were brilliant students, if you had one for a lab partner you never, never let them touch a tool. Same deal. While most American kids that wanted to be an engineer had some grease under their fingernails, the foreign students were upper middle class and hadn't spent any time out in a garage rebuilding a Royal Enfield.

[Sasquatch Jones]

I hate when that happens.

[Sasquatch Jones]

rebuilding a

I have noticed that here too. Many times well-to-do non-US students need detailed procedures - even after they graduate and have been working for a few years. They seem to like check lists - which I like too, but unless you're doing some kind of standard job, you usually have to make your own checklists. The exception is Mexican students - they are extremely sharp, resourceful and will not give up until something works.

One time we were doing a job for a Korean company. They sent a few engineers to the US for inspection. We learned quickly if you asked them questions about what they wanted to see, you end up spending 2 hours trying to guess what they mean. Ended up just giving them lists of things to check and they were happy. The last sheet said "Is the inspection satisfactory - Yes or No. If "No" please list the items to correct and what constitutes acceptability." That pretty much insured a passing inspection the first time around. Funny -- all one of them did was go around the plant taking close up photos of pages in people's notebooks. They were obviously not the right people to send for an inspection.

[Jeff Wisnia]

Lim time!

I'm doing just what you had told me to do. You really just wanted a very tight screw. So a wrench on your dong, Seemed not at all wrong, You can stick it back on with some glue.

Jeff

[Roy]

How to undo a bra strap with one hand?

[Stormin Mormon]

A key with hanging tag you would fob it With nose in the air you would snob it With a sharp paring knife Nae longer John's Wayne's wife Her name, my dear, is Lorena Bobbit

[micky]

FWIW, I live in a middle to lower-middle class townhouse n'hood. and with only a few exceptions, I never see anyone working on their house or their car.

I have one n'bor 5 houses away who buys cars and has a partner who knows how to fix them, and then he sells them.

And another 10 houss in the other direction who I've seen working under the hood.

And a n'bor 8 doors in that direction who borrowed the shower stem socket from me.

Maybe it's not as bad as I t hink. I don't know what people do in their back yards

And the front yards are small, about 22' x 22', so there's not much to do there except gardening, and most do keep their lawns very nice. They bag their clippings and maybe fertilize, so the grass is very green. OTOH, I'm from Indiana, where I don't think anyone bagged clippings (do they now maybe?)

My immediate next door n'bor married a mechanical engineer, and he did everything, replacing the whole batroom, but the several n'bors in that house earlier did nothing, afaik. The current one is the one that wants the basement powder room and seems to have delayed building it because of the price. It's certainly a job I could do myself if I wanted it. (He has two daughters)

Each house has a small sort-of patio in front of it, surrounded by a shoulder high "privacy fence" that needs rebuilding every 20 years or so. I've seen 5 or 10 n'bors hire someone to do that. Only I and the guy above next door did it himself.

A lot of these people may have grown up in rentals, and the landlord took care of problems, and some other projects that are not caused by "problems" would have required the ll's permission. It will be interesting to see if their kids figure out they could do their own repairs for a lot less money, but I won't know because the kids move away.

(One of my n'bor's kids is a vice-president of a Fortune 50 company with global sales. His mother can hardly believe it. (His father died when he was about 18. The kid used to mow my lawn. His friends teased him because his job was harder than theirs working in McDonalds, for example, but he said he made 3 times what they made. He also played varsity football, and once I saw in a local paper a list of honor roll students, and his name was in the list.)

[rbowman]

Overall, I've found Mexicans to exhibit the Yankee ingenuity that the Yankees lost a generation ago. The gabachos look down on the MacGyvered solutions but if they were faced with the same problem they'd be screwed if they couldn't find a COTS fix.

[Tekkie®]

Sasquatch Jones posted for all of us...

We used to (in non PC days) call the Japanese speed wrenches. You do know there is a correct way to use them - no joke?