Eggs and More

“Easter egg dyes certainly aren’t as good as they were when I was a child! All I could get out of my red dye was a pale pink egg ─ so I got out the bright red fingernail polish and now I have a beauty of a red egg.”

The above quote might have been said earlier this week as some parent was helping to create colored eggs for use today. I think anyone can read that and hear it in their parents’ voice, too. But it is actually from a letter my great-wrote to my great-uncle 1945. Did they even have dye back then? Of course they did, the letter says so.

But it is easy to imagine our quality complaints are solely this generation’s issue. The “they don’t make them like they used to,” lament is sure to garner a sympathetic nod of agreement, no matter what the product. Funny how the user’s skill level is never called into question. Maybe, the product is not faulty, you’re just an idiot.

The reverse of this thought is “I had to walk X miles through Y conditions to do the same thing you’re doing now,” boast. Yes, your school might have been farther way than mine, but did it have metal detectors? Security guards? Different challenges doesn’t equate to different levels of difficulty, just different experiences.

So that is why I love finding little tidbits like the above quote from an older generation. This was in a letter over 80 years old, yet expresses a sentiment we hear today. Because their pictures are in black and white, we often assume they were flat colorless people incapable of understanding the modern world. What a mistake. They laughed, cried, made jokes, made out just like we do today. And they complained about today’s stuff being crap just like we do today. No doubt the laser egg dyes of tomorrow will be a piece of crap, too.