As he pulled the truck up to the barn, the old rancher
sighed. He didn’t really like his new
pickup, and wished he was still driving his old Ford.
As he climbed down from the new truck, he glanced over at the old
truck, with its multiple dings and dents, with the cracked rear window, and
with the twisted antenna that had resisted a dozen attempts at straightening it
with pliers. The old rancher had joked
numerous times that the truck was old enough to vote. Sadly, he had recently realized that the
truck was getting close to being old enough to drink—twice.
For years, his wife and son had urged him to replace the vintage
Ford, but he had resisted, insisting that the truck was still reliable and that
he was used to its peculiarities. The transmission
jammed easily unless you knew how to baby the stick, there was some kind of
intermittent short with the turn signals, and the bench seat was about 4 inches
lower than it had been when he had bought the truck in the seventies.
Still, he loved the old truck. It was reliable and he knew all of her quirks
and idiosyncrasies. He had worked on the
truck so many times, he could repair anything on it without consulting a manual,
and probably already had the necessary parts in the aluminum truck box behind
the cab.
Sadly, however, he had been forced to admit that the old truck
was taking longer to get up to highway speed, had a little play in the
steering, and was taking uncomfortably longer to brake to a stop. His wife had been bugging him for years about
airbags and better safety, too. The
deciding moment had come when he had loaded the backhoe onto its trailer and
attempted to tow it to the dealership for repair. The old truck just couldn’t handle the job
and sadly, he knew then it was time to purchase a new truck.
After spending an entire day wandering the dealerships looking at
new trucks, the old rancher had almost changed his mind—the new trucks were
depressingly expensive. Worse, he didn’t
like what he saw, as the newer trucks seemed more suited to taking the family
to church than to being a good work truck.
He didn’t want carpeted floors or leather seats...he wanted durable
vinyl and a heavy-duty bed. By the end
of the day, he had decided he wouldn’t trade his old truck for a new one, even
if the dealership had offered the swap for no money.
There were several things about the new vehicles he didn’t
like. He wanted an 8-foot bed on the
truck--one long enough to haul lumber and the newer trucks were too short. They all seemed too fragile: the metal bodies
felt too thin, the bumpers were plastic, and he really didn’t need all the
bells and whistles the newer trucks all seemed to have. As far as he was concerned, these features
were just so many fragile toys that would soon need repairs. The new trucks aggravated him—all he
needed was simple transportation and a reliable work vehicle.
In all the ways that mattered to him, the new expensive pickups
were just not as reliable as his old one.
Also, the fact that the new trucks cost several times what he had paid
for his last pickup made him angry; he felt that half the price he would have
to pay was going for ‘pretty’ instead of ‘useful’.
There was, however, no way that he could continue to ignore the
obvious—he needed a newer truck. As much
as he didn’t like it, he had to find more dependable transportation. After several more trips to various
dealerships, he finally bought a truck.
Not at a dealership, but from a private owner whom his son had located
on the internet.
It seems that the Southwest was a popular place for retiring
snowbirds—those poor damn Yankees freezing their asses off up north—to move
after retiring. Brand new travel
trailers were regularly towed south by eager retirees seeking to thaw out. As soon as they arrived, the joy of driving
large trucks built for towing a heavy loads soon wore out and they were eager
to sell their new trucks and purchase smaller cars.
The “new” truck only had a few thousand miles on it, had cost
about half what the dealership wanted, and still had far more features than the
old rancher had wanted, but it came with a heavy duty towing package and had a
long enough bed that he could still haul a full load. He doubted the new truck would last half as
long as his old truck, despite costing twice as much.
It was going to take a long time to get used to the automatic
transmission, as he was used to a ‘four-on-the-floor’ manual transmission. After buying the truck, all the way home he
had kept stomping on an imaginary clutch pedal, something he doubted he would
ever stop doing.
It was about a week later that his son came to visit and found
the rancher in the barn replacing the spark plugs on the old truck.
“What are you doing, getting it fixed up to sell?”, asked his
son.
“Nope. Going to keep her,”
he replied.
“Keep it? It’s a piece of
junk. And you have a new truck.”
“Yep. I’ll use the new one
on the highway and for towing the trailer.
But I’ll keep using the Ford on the ranch. She’s a better work truck, and still has
years of life on her.”
“You’re just too stubborn to accept change,” his son answered.
The old rancher gathered the wrenches he had laid out on the old
Ford’s fender, returning them to the tool box and slammed the hood closed on
the truck. As he walked to the side of
the Ford truck to return to the tools to the truck box, the son continued his
questions.
“It’s old, and worn out, and no longer works the way it used
to. It’s time to replace it with
something newer.”
The old rancher, shut the truck box, turned and leaned against
his old Ford.
After a long pause, the old rancher finally answered, “Which one
of us are you talking about?”
Yeah, no kidding, Mark. I've gone through the same crap with my computer. I'm up to 12 GB RAM and a 4 GB Graphics card and swapped out the CPU for something way faster. I'm still a generation behind the latest stuff and the more I "upgrade", the more I lose the use of the programs I know how to use in favor of either free programs that won't let me do what I knew how to do with my old Photoshop or Pagemaker. It's either that or I get to spend 500 to 1000 dollars on new stuff I don't understand how to use and which have so many "features" that I have no idea what they are used for. Then there's the whole "rent-a-software" thing where you have to rent software per month whether you actually use it or not and it automatically "updates" you without asking if you actually want to be updated and spend a week figuring out all the new features and searching in vain for the multi-layered, misnamed sequence of mouse clicks that will let you use the templates you've been using for more than a decade. Getting old on the old computer farm isn't anymore fun than getting old on the ranch.
ReplyDeleteDanged whippersnappers!
Tom