The other evening, as I approached my car after a long day at work, I noticed that the back left tire was very low.  I had no idea if it was low when I went to work or even how long it’s been low.  I’m not much for observing the subtleties of life like tire pressure.
Luckily, the tire was still semi-drivable. 

So, I headed down to the nearest gas station to fill up the tire and hopefully make it home without having to change the tire.
When I got to the gas station I was confronted with one of these:

The air station was capable of accepting credit cards, so I didn’t have to start digging around for quarters.  I slid my card into the reader fully aware that by this time next week my card numbers will be used to purchase caskets in Minsk.
True story.  We recently had a great deal of fraud coming out of Russia at work.  For those unaware, I work for a credit card processing middle man company.  One of the more interesting fraud cases was a return of a casket.  I guess the guy took it home and decided it didn’t go with the drapes in the living room.
OK, now back to me.
After receiving payment, the air station starts whirling and I hook it up to my tire, hear the distinctive whiff of escaping air and for three minutes add air to my tire.  The whole time there appeared to be no increase in my tire pressure.  So I bought three more minutes.  Again there was no increase in tire pressure.
And here’s where we begin to get to the heart of this post and the question posed in it’s title.  Back in the day, when a attendant would check your air as you filled you Olds Vista Cruiser with Ethyl at the Esso station, if he took the air hose to your tire, the air pressure was so strong you could hear it coursing through your tires.  Now you can’t tell if anything is happening.
Figuring that this station was somehow broken, I journeyed to another gas station, with the same results.
Giving up, I drove home on a dangerously low tire.
The next day I changed out the back left tire with the spare.  And here we get to part two of my question.  What happened to the car jack?  In the good old days, the car jack was a ratchet jack.  Click, click, click and your car was up.  Now we have to deal with one of these monstrosities:

And the rod used to twist the screw is assembled in such a way as to fly apart as soon as you work up any speed and hitting yourself in the nuts.  Now that last part is my fault.  I probably should wear pants when I work on my car.  But I’ll change my tire my way and you change it your way.
Can we please go back to a time when these things worked?  And once we get that done we can work on taking away the right to vote for women.