Generation Junk

About five years ago, for seven dollars, I bought an old citrus juicer at a thrift shop.  It was one of those vintage small appliances which seem built to survive gas explosions and hammer attacks. When I turned on the motor with a metal toggle switch, a drive shaft spun a heavy ceramic knob that gouged out the hearts of lemon and orange halves, leaving not a scrap of pulp uncrushed. The thing worked beautifully, almost like new, so I looked up its serial number on the internet to see when the unit was manufactured, guessing it might be almost forty years old. Wrong. It dated to the 1940s. It was seventy, the stubborn monster, still giving satisfaction with every use.