There are many items which I thought would be a bigger part of my adult life and have not panned out as planned. Flying cars for one, but that’s a whole essay by itself. Today’s gripe is much lower on the technology totem pole. I am talking of course about grappling hooks.
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From GI Joe cartoons to action movies — and even in a muppets heist/caper movie! — grappling hooks were a huge part of my childhood world. As an adult with a career in the software industry: not so much.

But what are my options? I could switch to a military career, but my feeling is that grappling hook usage is probably overstated even for those guys. Maybe some sort of forest service type position? Are they using ropes and hooks to climb trees? I don’t know. Thinking about it, I’m not sure that I even saw a grappling hook in the latest guys-trying-to-be-navy-seals special that I watched. Lots of rope and wall climbing for sure, but I feel like those ropes were just sort of attached to those walls.

Maybe a criminal enterprise? If I were regularly breaking into banks or seedy compounds in the desert … would I need more grappling abilities in those situations?

I’m sure you can see my frustration here. It’s not simply that I’m using fewer grappling hooks than I thought I might, it’s that it exposes a bigger issue. The simple explanation is that I overestimated the presence which grappling hooks have in the world, and as time has gone on and I’ve aged I need to adjust my internal sense of the world to account for this oversight. The more complex explanation is that I was purposefully misled into believing things which weren’t true. Somewhere between those possibilities I guess there’s a chance that the world of the mid-80s was a world with a lot more grappling hooks in it, but times have changed and my expectations need to catch up.

I’m not really sure what to do about this.