I got yelled at for working on my car growing up, even if I was doing it at someone else's house
That's sad. I do everything I can to encourage our younger generation to learn how to "figure things out" and fix stuff. It doesn't take an engineering degree, just curiosity and a willingness to screw things up and ask for help (occasionally).
I did get scolded one time for being curious about how things work. At the time, the only phone company was AT&T ("Ma Bell") for everyone in the USA. No one owned phones. They were all leased from the phone company as part of your service. You paid for each one on your monthly bills. They also had mechanical bells for ringers and the round, put-your-booger-picker-in-a-hole-and-spin (seven times) dial contraptions to make a call.
My old man worked swing-shift at a paper mill. He was on nights. Mom was a nurse and was at work, dad was sleeping after the night shift. That's how we kids were "supervised" back then. "Wake me up if one of you puts a hole in another of you..."
So, what I got scolded for: Pops wakes up around noon to feed us and walks into the dining room to see the leased phone in pieces on the kitchen table. Son #1 (me) decided to see how it worked, so I removed it from the wall and disassembled it. He arrived as I was examining the dialing mechanism, looked at me while walking by (didn't even miss a step or do a double-take), and while continuing to the fridge to figure out what to feed his monsters, said, "son, right now the pressure's on you to put that back together in working order before your mother gets home. After that, the pressure's gonna be on your backside. Understand?" Or something to that effect. He was a man of few words, but when the words came, it was always interesting.
The phone was back in operating order when mom walked in the door. But not without a hiccup. The cradle that held the receiver was mis-adjusted somehow and I couldn't get it adjusted so that it triggered the switch that cut the line when hung up before mom got home, so I taped some cardboard on the part hidden inside the casing to trigger that switch. That phone survived like that for many years after, until the breakup of Ma Bell, at which point those phones disappeared and we were all free to buy any phone we wanted. I can't remember if the phones got turned in or just trashed, but wherever it ended up, it still had that cardboard shim in it that only I knew about!
And that's when my inner-engineer paralyzed with OCD first learned what "good enough" means!
) so taking it easy with painting some of the chipped paint inside the grill
