Anything I can do, my Dad can do better

My dad, much like most dads, can do anything. A call often comes from my mum along the lines of:

“Nick, the car won’t start.”
“Don’t worry love I’ll have a look.” Twenty minutes later it’s running like new.

“Nick, the fridge is leaking a green fluid.”
“OK my dear, I’ll see what I can do.” A day later the fluid will be gone.

“Nick, there’s a massive international diplomatic crisis in Somalia.”
“Give me 5 minutes and I’ll be right with you.” A week later, the eastern African state will be conducting democratic elections that see a victory for a progressive liberal party that oversee the transformation to a major world economic power with low crime.

Sadly I’m lagging behind in that department. I recently went to buy a car, and was shown up terribly for my lack of knowledge:

“This car has only done 54,000 miles. Just has a broken stereo.”
“Only 54,000 miles? That’s the same as going round the world. Twice! You say the stereo is broken?”
“It’s easy to fix, just take this Allen key and ...”
“Who’s Alan?”
“Just take it and turn it in your gersabulator.”
“I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish.”

He charged me £200 extra, added a few long words and I walked out feeling rather flummoxed. I rang my Dad to ask his opinion about matters, but he was busy rewiring the whole house so he could control each appliance with his mind.

“They quoted me £3,000,000 and I’d have to wait 1000 years for the research to be done, but I got this book from the library and thought I’d give it a go. I’ll be able to have a couple of pints with the money I save.”

Needing music for my drive to and from work, I decided to have a go at replacing the broken stereo in my car. Shouldn’t be too hard I thought. The back of my shiny, new CD player looked friendly enough for an electrical appliance. Big plug holes for wires to connect to. No tricky instructions and it even had pictures. Perhaps I’d been giving my father too much credit.

I pulled out the old stereo, expecting to see easy to replace wires, no tricky instructions and even pictures, but all I saw were my shattered dreams. It looked like a Jackson Pollack painting; all colours visible to man, all seemingly merging into the same tiny hole in the back of the unit. To make sure I couldn’t check where they were going, the ends of the wires were bound together with black tape.

The back of my car stereo

With this came the realisation that I’m part of a generation that relies far too heavily on others. So many of us have just one skill, usually the one we have to learn for work, but don’t have a clue when it comes to something that requires knowledge outside of our forced studies.

Having said that, to cheer myself up I logged on to my laptop, checked my email, ordered a new book and bought some gig tickets. By the time my old man manages to figure out how to do that, they will have invented a car stereo that replaces itself.