Everyone remembers making regular visits to their grandparents’ homes and taking note of the way they did things.
At my maternal grandparent’s home I always found it entertaining that my grandfather used small colored stickers to highlight the most used buttons on his electronics.
I can only assume he used these stickers to more easily find the buttons he used the most, but for whatever reason kept hitting the wrong one, and thereby got an unexpected result.
Even though I had a pretty good idea why he did it, I found it amusing that he had to use these stickers as a type of cheat sheet, especially since the buttons are already clearly marked by the manufacturer.
Later in life I came into possession of one of grandpa’s old piano benches he used while playing music. One of my favorite aspects of the bench is that he made it, so therefore it has a lot of sentimental value.
After taking possession of the bench I looked inside the bench’s storage area and found an old microphone, various cables and of course, sheets of those colored round stickers.
When I found them I immediately remembered all of grandpa’s old equipment, covered in little colored circles of yellow, blue and red. After my trip down memory lane, I put them back in the bench, forgetting about them until just recently.
I recently became the owner of a piece of electronics with very small buttons, which I kept mixing up. After several times of inadvertently powering down the device as opposed to simply ejecting a disk, I remembered the colored stickers in that bench.
As I placed the colored stickers on key areas of my device, with the words “power” and “eject” not so neatly written on them, I laughed to myself and thought, “If only grandpa could see me now.”