You know you're middle aged when

[Andy W]

When im attempting to carry out bike maintenance in the garage, with the door closed because of the cold weather ,2 flourescent lights not ample so i have  Makita battery powered high power lights as well, wearing reading glasses, and because im no longer supple and have diminished fine motor skills, im becoming slower, even grumpier than i ever imagined.
I get there in the end , but close up fine work is more challenging. Now, when i go for a solo night ride in the countryside i dread getting a puncture. Ah well, hop on the turbo and listen to Boom Radio!

[T42]

When im attempting to carry out bike maintenance in the garage, with the door closed because of the cold weather ,2 flourescent lights not ample so i have  Makita battery powered high power lights as well, wearing reading glasses, and because im no longer supple and have diminished fine motor skills, im becoming slower, even grumpier than i ever imagined.
I get there in the end , but close up fine work is more challenging. Now, when i go for a solo night ride in the countryside i dread getting a puncture. Ah well, hop on the turbo and listen to Boom Radio!

Dunno what kind of riding you're doing, but last year I got around 6500 km out of a pair of Schwalbe Durano Plus tyres.  I have Slime tubes in them but there were no green splats in the casing when I changed the rear last month.  The old tyre still had tread visible on the contact surface but the overall profile had got a bit "squared-off". There was still as much rubber on it as there was on a new GP4000 (RIP), though.

[T42]

When you go to put the new insurance certificate (wee green thing like a large stamp here) in the holder on the windscreen and discover that the one already in there expired a year ago.

[T42]

You can't remember what it was you were trying to remember just now.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Middle age ends somewhere before 55. It's official, I've just read it in the Grauniad.

The machine I’m currently using was supplied by my partner and has extra big buttons designed for sight-impaired folk, or elderly folk such as myself.” Carole, 55, Huddersfield

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/20/fun-way-consume-music-why-sales-of-cassette-tapes-soaring

[Kim]

You know you're middle aged when the presbycusis makes cassette tape sounds decent...

(This is a bit unfair to the medium.  We tend to associate cassette with Woolies C90 mix tapes, Walkmans with dying batteries, dictation-oriented recorders from the 1970s and albums turning into Queen's Greatest Hits because they've been in the car too long.  But if you used a good quality tape on a machine with Dolby S, the results were surprisingly good.)

[Cudzoziemiec]

Cassettes were my main mode of music listening in the 80s and 90s, because they were cheaper than CDs, I didn't have a CD player, and they were more portable than vinyl. But from my present point of view, they offer poor sound quality and are reminiscent of the past of recorded music without some of its best aspects, such as the album sleeve artwork and the visual qualities of vinyl (and to a lesser extent CDs) themselves.

[Kim]

I only really discovered music some time after my parents had a CD player, so my MO was to buy (or more usually, borrow) albums on CD (which wasn't significantly more expensive than cassette) and immediately copy them to cassette for my own use, on the basis that tapes get eaten and I'd probably own a CD player eventually.  By my late teens I owned a Minidisc^[1] recorder and a CD-ROM drive, so cassette was functionally relegated to playing music in the car.  Or would have been if I'd had a car.


_{[1] An underappreciated format that set out to do everything cassette did but better, and succeeded.  Unfortunate that it was rendered obsolete by Moore's Law a few years later.}

[MattH]

I tended to buy music on vinyl, then record onto my own cassettes for use in the car/walkman/whatever. Maxell XLII (or XLIIS if I was feeling flush) Chrome blanks were pretty expensive and not massively cheaper than a prerecorded tape, but sounded far better.

[FifeingEejit]

I only really discovered music some time after my parents had a CD player, so my MO was to buy (or more usually, borrow) albums on CD (which wasn't significantly more expensive than cassette) and immediately copy them to cassette for my own use, on the basis that tapes get eaten and I'd probably own a CD player eventually.  By my late teens I owned a Minidisc^[1] recorder and a CD-ROM drive, so cassette was functionally relegated to playing music in the car.  Or would have been if I'd had a car.


_{[1] An underappreciated format that set out to do everything cassette did but better, and succeeded.  Unfortunate that it was rendered obsolete by Moore's Law a few years later.}

The history of the MiniDisc is much more interesting than it appears from Western European/USAnian eyes
Annoyingly I can't find the article about it's purpose in Japanese music retail/rental.

I used MDs in the car until Summer last year cos I got a new car forcing me to use USB and miniDisc players on e-bay being stupidly expensive. (My two portable that I could connect over an FM thingy, one has a dodgy anti-skip memory and the other a duff battery bay)

[Kim]

The history of the MiniDisc is much more interesting than it appears from Western European/USAnian eyes
Annoyingly I can't find the article about it's purpose in Japanese music retail/rental.

Yes, they actually bought the pre-recorded ones over there, which was basically unheard of in the West. 

Over here it was the recordability that was the killer feature, and it took years for the price to reach a level where it became a mainstream consumer product rather than a no-brainer replacement for Fidelipac and loops of open-reel tape in professional applications.  In its heyday playback-only walkmans were common here, but they were always backed up by access to a recorder.  I think I've encountered exactly one pre-recorded MD in the wild, and that was bundled with a MZ-1 (which dates it to before MD became mainstream).

There's probably a parallel universe where the data version wasn't made deliberately incompatible with the audio discs and it became the de-facto standard of the pre-flash-memory era rather then Iomega Zip.

[ian]

I'm still pleased to say that our car still has a cassette player (the only one in our possession, unless there's something buried under the VHS player in the loft). That said, I think that's only there because Ford wanted to punish us for buying their cheapest car.

[Cudzoziemiec]

That's quite an achievement, ian. Even my last car (sold 2007) had a CD player.

[Kim]

I think I may have re-installed the OEM cassette player in my last car before selling it at around the same time.

The CD player (which was posh and could play MP3s from CD-Rs and SD cards) languished in a box along with the 'never again' voltmeter for a few years, until I decided that if I were to end up owning another motor vehicle it would be far enough in the future that there wouldn't be anywhere to install it.

[ian]

That's quite an achievement, ian. Even my last car (sold 2007) had a CD player.

If I recall we bought the car brand new in 2006, so definitely punishment for our parsimony by Ford. Henry would have been on our side.

That said we never listen to music in the car because we sing. It's a glorious thing. The musicals we've written and forgotten.

[Cudzoziemiec]

CD players seem to break down a lot IME. The one in that car didn't work. I don't think it worked when we bought the car and it definitely didn't work when we sold it (but the bloke who bought it didn't notice). The one in the Sony hifi that has somehow followed us through multiple house moves since ~2002 gave up the ghost about a decade ago, but the radio and cassette player still work. We don't have any cassettes now though... And the cheapo portable CD player I bought to replace it doesn't work too well either. Oh, and the one in the bookchazzer where I occasionally pretend to help, which is a rather posh separates set-up (can't remember the brand, but no directional cables or deoxygenated copper USB ports) swallows CDs.

[ian]

I have a duffel bag of cassette mix tapes in the loft, basically uranium-dense nostalgia and a catalogue of now demised relationships. You probably can't explain to young people the ceremonial courtship exchange of mix tapes that had to happen before you came close to exchanging bodily fluids. Never mind the coruscating judgement as she leisurely inspected your taste in sonic entertainment. So much work would go into the selection of the tunes, knowing that any single one could trip you up. One mistake and you definitely weren't getting any. Well, I liked Rock Me Amadeus.

[Mr Larrington]

I have one of those folding crates full of C90s under the desk in the Estate Office.  Not from misplaced nostalgia but rather because it's the exact size and density to stop the pedals attached to the PC in there from sliding forwards under heavy braking.

[Kim]

I lost count of the number of computer optical drives I've managed to kill over the years.  I had a second-hand 2x SCSI CD writer that was utterly bulletproof, but everything since seems to have stopped recognising discs or turned into a coaster factory at some point.  (Special award for the one that could only read the discs it had burned itself.  Something must have been badly out of spec.)  I recall dismantling a dead one (I think in the hope of scavenging a motor for something or other) and discovering a disc that I'd ostensibly lost a couple of years previously had become permanently wedged in the space above the tray mechanism, without imparing its function.

That said, it's not like cheap cassette mechanisms were a paragon of reliability either.  They had the analogue advantage of some failure modes causing them to sound bad rather than stop working entirely, but that doesn't excuse the ones that turned your favourite tape to salad, or a faulty eject button meaning you had to listen to Abba: The Album over and over until your parents bought a new car.

VHS deserves special mention for being far more robust than it had any right to be.

[Kim]

I have one of those folding crates full of C90s under the desk in the Estate Office.  Not from misplaced nostalgia but rather because it's the exact size and density to stop the pedals attached to the PC in there from sliding forwards under heavy braking.

Similarly, barakta has a SPARCStation on ergonomic foot-rest duty.  It probably still works, but it's hard to tell as we got rid of the associated monitor years ago because I wasn't happy with keeping that much depleted uranium in the house.

[Adam]

I'm sure other people have posted this one before, and no doubt everyone apart from me realised it anyway, but I was surprised to discover that I'll qualify for free prescriptions from next month when I'm 60. 

I thought it was 65.

[T42]

...when you stop noticing that your knee hurts and start noticing when it doesn't.

[Mrs Pingu]

When you decide you need to invest in a vacuum cleaner for upstairs.
It's only a matter of time before I batter the feck out of the walls humphing the current one up the stairwell.
(In my defense we never had an upstairs to hoover before).

[Canardly]

Oh how true lol...

[Kim]

When you decide you need to invest in a vacuum cleaner for upstairs.
It's only a matter of time before I batter the feck out of the walls humphing the current one up the stairwell.
(In my defense we never had an upstairs to hoover before).

Traditionally that one's self-solving, as you ought to inherit one from some deceased relation in your parents generation at around the same time.  Of course, it only works properly when vacuum cleaners last forever as long as they're fed enough bags and belts, and maybe have their motor re-wound by the nice man in the little shop every couple of decades.  Nobody wants to inherit a well-worn Dyson.