That’s pretty interesting. I was wondering what you would say. Some of those were surprising, some seemed a bit peculiar till I though about the climate difference.
There’s some roofers working on a couple of roofs in the neighborhood, for example. They’re supposed to wear a safety harness. Around here most of them don’t. I live in Phoenix AZ, btw, so think hot and desert. The houses in this neighborhood were built in the 60s so the roofs are pretty much flat, or very little slope. The 60s style was also lower ceilings. Your risk of injury on the roof is smaller and if you fall off, you’re not going be that injured because you’re not going to roll or slide off. Worst case, you might break a bone. A lot of people complain about the safety rigging causing injury because you can get wrapped up in it.
You go north or here past the snow line (imaginary map line that delineates where you get significant snow that sticks yearly vs not) and job supervisors are less likely to be lax on safety harnesses. The roofs, on average, tend to have those little architectural differences to accommodate snow and colder weather in general.
The car washing thing surprised me. Then I thought, "oh yeah. Snow. Freezing temps. Months of the year." We have auto car washes and have for years. You can even get your interior cleaned out and detailed. Twenty years ago I lived in a pretty small town, pop around 10K. We had two car washes.
Most people washed their own cars though. It’s fun for the kids and the dogs (or goats, if you have them). Who doesn’t enjoy being chased around with a water hose or having soapy sponges tossed at them or wrung over their heads on a hot summer day? At the time I did not have kids, but I did have a blue tick coon hound, a boat, and a jeep. Coon Tut LOVED wash day. It was also lake day out at the state park. We’d load the dog up, hitch up the boat, head down to the lake for the day, come back, take care of the gear, wash the boat, wash the jeep, wash the dog, sometimes wash ourselves, and call it a day. I would not want that to be how I spent my early March days in Norway though. Too cold. We used to water ski from late February till the middle of November.
That seemed pretty typical for where I lived. I live in AZ now, as I said. In the nearly 10 years I’ve lived here I have never seen anyone out washing their car. Here they go to a car wash. The sun is pretty brutal on car paint here, so part of what you get at a car wash service is a protective coating to protect your car’s paint job.
These days nearly everyone uses debit cards. I agree that was a slow process, mostly having to do with banks in my opinion. Older people were less inclined to want to convert as well though.
Completely agree about baggers. Useless. Seemed more about status to me. Being a young woman at the time, many a bagger creeped me out. Those things always seemed a status or privilege flex to me, or so we would describe them today. At the same time, our cities are set up to promote driving. Most were designed to help the auto industry. I look at photos of many cities in Europe and wonder why there are still so many cars when you can get out and walk. (I usually conclude it’s too cold to walk until I recall that most of y’all have a winter wardrobe, haha.) Anyway, with our cities being set up like they are, that’s the reason for the bagging type jobs for the most part. Since you’re not walking, you’ve no need for trolleys to help you get things home. But a bagger will then take them out to your car for you.
Except for stuff like Walmart’s Adopt a Geezer program, you don’t see stuff like that anymore either except maybe in really posh hotels and restaurants up north where it’s they still like to money flex. There are still bellboys though.
I’m like you. I can’t imagine travelling with so much baggage that you need somebody to carry it for you. Do these folks not know how to pack? What’s up with that? The rest of the stuff you said was pretty much spot on too, at least for the time frame you made the observations. We still don’t have seat belts of safety seats for kids on public busses, at least, not anywhere I’ve seen. Parking attendants are pretty much the same, some places are automated though. Our citizens aren’t as trustworthy as yours, a lot is them will skip out on paying the ticket if you use those so you get the money up front. ;-).
