PWBrewer's Blog

Another incredible day here in Santa Barbara. Well. Another day also without making a sale. But, I know that there will be one soon. Because all sales is a matter of several factors. The biggest is the number of times you expose your product to a new person. Its all about the numbers. We can each have a different number, but all people involved in business or sales has a number.

Another gorgeous day in Santa Barbara. I think it is amazing how difficult it is for people to make an appointment! For some reason, one of the most important professionals in a person’s life is the sales consultant for their automobile. Seriously. If a person makes an appointment to get their doctor to give them an opinion, they don’t take him for granted and no show or late show. So why the sales professional for their auto?

Why, when it rains do car sales seem to be slow? It is strange, but you have to notice that certain days are busier than others. People naturally don’t like to do things in bad weather, but maybe they should Since it is slow, that is a great day to maybe get a great deal.

Imagine someone coming and telling your grandparents (or earlier), that they were going to bring your outhouse in the house and stick it in your closet.

Now imagine someone coming to you and announcing they were going to move your toilet and bath out side 30 yards away!

Do you get my point? ChangesTheBook has just been a way to catalog some of the obvious changes.  It is designed to give future generations a chance to see how dramatic for us the changes have been.  How these experiences in our few short years have impacted us. As our grand kids will undoubtedly see the same kinds of cataclysmic changes, it is simply unimaginable how different life will continue to be.

It has been said that if all the knowledge in the world until now was represented by a dime, the amount of knowledge and change represented in the next generation similarly would be dimes stacked on top of each other reaching the height of the Washington Monument!

So when you can’t find your cell phone or your laptop is not working properly or you can’t get a signal for your wifi, just relax knowing life WILL go on…. knowing this human brain will continue to discover new inventions to make our life easier…or for some, to make our life more complex.  Why, because our brain is trying to “catch up” with the speed in which discoveries are made.

It causes us to question the origin of these complexities, and the human desire to change and grow, to learn and to discover new frontiers. Changes will continue to occur.  Our children with continue on this path of change, and their children will do the same. Hopefully for the good of mankind.

And….     Hopefully for the mere joy of exercising our God given ability to do just that…Change!!

I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed this short narrative on Changes.  It has been a real love affair to write.

ChangesTheBook will be available soon at Amazon for Kindle, and shortly thereafter in print version.  Please visit the website, www.t38.net to see other books published by the author.

Change in general is such an interesting thing. There is no such thing as stagnant. Everything is always changing. Nothing is constant. Yet, sometimes it seems like there is absolutely no movement. Someone once said (they must have), there is nothing that is changing that is remaining the same. Or something like that.

We are in a world of very dramatic change. Technology is constantly changing everything. Its impact sociologically is probably the biggest change. Technology has allowed man to harness time and accomplish so much more in such a short period of time.

You now travel in hours what used to take years. Communication in weeks now is instantaneous. We accept this so blindly. Its just the way it is. No big deal. Yet, imagine all of it going away tomorrow. Imagine trying to live a life of a 19th century person. Or 18th. Or earlier. You simply can’t. You take too much for granted.

It is now a catastrophe if the lights go out even for a few minutes. A day, no way. Your cell phone doesn’t work and you can’t function. I know. I am that way. People say they are not into change. They want it to be the way it is. Yet, the way it is isn’t the way it was. What a hypocritical statement. Just having a heater in your home is a luxury that your forefathers a few hundred years ago didn’t enjoy. It was a daily task of considerable effort to bring in water. You had to brave the elements to go outside to the outhouse.

Sayings!!!!!!!!!

This is an interlude chapter. I have thought about adding saying for some time. So here are some: Sayings (some long gone, and some almost forgotten, and in no particular order):

1. Heavens to mergatroid! (no idea what a mergatroid is. However, in a particular upbeat moment, this one can be a real under liner!)
2. Finer than a frogs hair split three ways!
3. Sky Blue pink. A color rarely seen, but when it is, there is no mistaking it.
4. I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you!! Time to hide out or change course.
5. Good Granny Grunt! (You get the idea) Best said with a southern twang.
6. Beat the fire out of ya, or peck the fire out of ya.
7. Good golly, miss molly.
8. All the Ruth’s versus all the Mildred’s.
9. I’m gonna jerk a knot in your tail!
10. Wanna little peach tree? (Refers to getting a switch for a good spanking)
11. That’s like a pot calling the kettle black.
12. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
13. Don’t jump out of the frying pan in to the fire. (Many variations on this).
14. Look at the swing on that back porch.
15. I’d sure like to swing in that swing. (From Ed).
16. It’s snowing down south. (When women used to wear slips, and it was showing).
17. Would you like some fries with that Shake?
18. You want some cheese with that wine.
19. Have you got bats in the cave? (buggers)
20. Your momma’s home. (buggers)
21. You raised in the barn (means shut that door)?
22. Your barn doors open. (Zipper)
23. Just a hop skip and a jump.
24. As the crow flies.
25. Bingo (refers to a state of fuel when talking to other pilots in your formation.)
26. That’s loud enough to wake the dead.
27. That will (or might) come back and bite you in the a….
28. Got a head full of rocks.
29. Monkey see, monkey do.
30. Fools names, like their faces, always seen in public places.
31. Dumber than a stump.
32. Flail (flay) the daylights out of you.
33. Golly ding.
34. That’s neither here nor there.
35. Come si, come saw.
36. They have bats in the belfry.
37. You got a screw loose?
38. I’m all ears.
39. Are your ears ringing? (who’s talking about you?)
40. Bun in the oven (pregnant)
41. Mess with the baker and you’ll get the buns!- Bob said that to me in the context that someone was going head to head with him and Bob was going to give him the what for…….I guess that’s another one, the what for thing!!

As I come to the end of this book/blog, I thought I would conclude with a couple of chapters about thoughts.  Some of my friends have sent me interesting things over the last year.  I have decided to add them to the Changes Book….

You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, ‘Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet..’

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers. But I can’t remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE … and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option – even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah … and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $99 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off.. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

This was one of the most interesting things that has disappeared in the face of retail. S&H Green Stamps. Course there were others, but the idea was similar today to a loyalty card, but given by most merchants with the idea of repeat business. As a kid, my Mom, who had collected the stamps, would assign me to take them, and lick them and put them in a book.

You would get stamps for a monetary amount in a transaction, and besides your change, you would get this long roll of stamps. Now in a few years time, folks reading this might not even know what a stamp is, but hopefully you understand. You know, a little square of paper, with perforated edges for tearing, and glue on the back. The front had S&H printed on, and well, you would =collect them, fill the book, and then when you had enough books, you could take a trip to France or acquire a bicycle or go shopping in one of their retail stores.

All the prices for the goods were listed in books, which represented thousands of hand licked stamps, collected methodically over months and years from every conceivable transaction. You could find gas stations that gave them, groceries, dry good, and department stores, and so forth.

Seems like, as a kid, we would dream of all these things we were going to get, so we got Mom to shop where we could get the most stamps. After a while, when you had a hundred books filled and you could realize that it would take 25,000 more to get a bicycle, you would begin to lose sight of the goal.

But never mind, it was a big deal. Seems like they just went away, and that was it. Not sure what happened to all those uncollected or unredeemed books, but, there are probably people out there somewhere hoping to still redeem their Gold Bond or S&H Green stamps.

One of my favorite machines was a game machine called pin ball. I am not sure when I first discovered pin ball, but when I did, I was instantly hooked for life. (I still own one of the early ones). In my memory, you got three plays for a dime, and five balls to a game. You could win extra plays pretty easy if you were good, and about every 10 plays or so, you would match the last two digits of the ending score and get a free play. Oh my gosh. Could we whittle away some time playing these. If we ran out of money, we would go and collect bottles for deposit return, and play again. But the fun of having the high score. You had to experience this first pin ball, before all the wizardry of the game machines that came later, to understand why Elton John’s song the Pin Ball Wizard was such a cool hit song.

I never could understand why someone would pay a nickel to weigh themselves. But they were around too. Much different then in the day, than now.

Of course, there must have been other coin machines back then, but nothing like today. There are now restaurants serving food in Japan completely hot, with only machines to vend.

The pay phone had a little box built in for the Coin change to fall in and for AT&T Bell to send their guys around and collect. They were not private then. There was only one phone company, for the whole country and there was no competition.

You would dial the number, using a rotary dial, then listen for the operator to tell you how much to put in. If it was local, i.e., your town, it was a dime. Otherwise, it was so much more fun cause you got to dig around for the right change combination to make a long distance call.

The really cool pay phones back then were in private boxes, usually indoors somewhere, that had doors and a chair. There might have been a phone book, but it wasn’t attached. People didn’t cut the cords to things then, or steal the books or rip out the pages, so it was all very orderly.

Another machine that was incredibly cool was a music machine. The were called Juke Boxes. They were originally free standing and were in the more popular hamburger eateries and diners. They were loaded up with 45 sized records and the labels on the machines allowed for you to select the song, press the button and rotate the machine around. You would then put in your money, and get your song played. Since there were no portable music devices, this freed you from the car to listen to music in other places. Music wasn’t played then through speakers in every imaginable place. You either listened to it live, had a phonograph player at home or an AM radio in your car. FM hadn’t been invented yet.

These machines were the epitome of cool. If you could afford to serenade all your friends and the rest of the public and you could do so with music you selected.