Everyone uses automatic bill payer, email, and goes to jiffy lube.
Who is *everyone*?
My clients send checks, in envelopes. My husband changes the oil in our vehicles and maintains the small engines in various other things. My bills arrive by snail mail and are paid by same, with checks.
Email use I will agree with. All my wholesale orders are now via e-mail and no one I do business with even uses fax, any longer. I occasionally receive product inquiries/retail orders by snail mail, but it is rare. Outside of some family Christmas letters, few people write to each other. We do send and receive birthday and holiday cards by snail mail.
As for the hand tools: everyone ought to be able to identify and use them. Why would a mechanical engineer not know what a phillips head screw driver is, for example (or any other tool/instrument)? So he can design a system, but never be able to do installation or maintenance? This person was working _for_ someone who knew these things. How lucky he was that his boss took an interest in him and expanded his education.
I know I am an old fossil, but at some point, *everyone* was not a college graduate who was dependent upon CAD-CAM and calculators. Prior to even thinking about college, people learned how things worked and needed to take them apart and put them back together, themselves. People were capable of drafting by hand, using a slide rule, architectural scales and instruments that did the job. People maintained their property by themselves. They cooked from scratch, mended or even made their own clothing and still managed to design machinery, draft exploded drawings, draw accurate maps and plans and basically produce the infrastructure today’s professionals take for granted and perhaps couldn’t replicate.
How does an entire generation function without this knowledge? What do they do in a power outage, just for one example? I suppose their parents are of a similar mindset, but I know many of us were inspired to learn such basics when we saw our own parents clueless and dependent upon tradesmen. In an economy such as this one, basic skills can be lifesavers, as well as ways to actually earn income.
barmag25, kudos to you. This young person will likely remember your instruction for the rest of their life.