This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.If there's one type of human who is both unique and completely interchangeable, it's the Classic Dad. Your father – assuming he is present in your life – is different but also almost exactly the same as everyone else's dad.Sometimes people tell me I have certain Classic Dad-like characteristics, like my love of a leather bumbag, but as hard as they try I can't shake my fear that I'll never be worthy of the title. I hate Dire Straits, never pretend to know about the merits of different exhaust pipes and hardly ever tell a bad joke.
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A co-worker recently confided that he too carries around the same burden. He's afraid that he – a man with the carpentry skills of a vole – will never be able to build his future offspring a dollhouse, like his father did.This got me wondering if the Classic Dad is in danger of becoming extinct as our generation has kids. So in tribute to my dad and all the other Classic Dads out there, and as a way to memorialise their best traits for the history books, I've compiled some of those traits and explained why I have absolutely no hope of continuing them.
CONFIDENCE IN EXPERTISE
PARALLEL PARKING
THEY KNOW WHAT THEY LIKE
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FALLING ASLEEP IN FRONT OF THE TV
CLASSIC DADS KNOW NO SHAME
BLAMING SOMEONE ELSE FOR NOT UNDERSTANDING HOW TECHNOLOGY WORKS
I feel good about this one, to be honest. I was once a nerd who understood HTML and Flash codes, but these days I don't even know how the "Cloud" works. If I keep going at this rate, by the time I have kids I'll be the one buying very expensive laptops without knowing how to properly protect them – which means they'll end up full of malware and viruses. I'll attempt to solve the problem by angrily calling my kids about the piece of junk I've been unlucky enough to purchase, and blaming my wife for downloading the wrong files.
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Never forget the ultimate Classic Dad, who filmed his trip to Las Vegas with his GoPro faced the wrong way the entire time.The more subtle traits of Classic Dads will probably be easier to learn – pulling the front of a baseball cap down after putting it on, so that a small tuft of hair sticks out the back; standing with your hands on your hips and making a weird face because you're intentionally looking directly into the sun; banging out puns like "Happy New Hair!" after someone gets a haircut.If we start out small, we might one day be worthy of following in our fathers' footsteps, and pass the ultimate way of being a dad on for generations to come.(Many thanks to Bibi and Rosa, who I borrowed for the pictures, and their mum, Loes Koster, who was OK with that!)