The modern workplace is on for young and old
HELP! My co-workers are all half my age. When I finished school in 1987, many of them hadn’t been born. In fact, when I was born in 1971, some of them were 30 years away from being conceived.
One of the lovely young lasses I work with recently admitted – somewhat sheepishly – that she was born in the year 2000 – the year I celebrated my 29th birthday.
“Older people really freak out when they hear that,” she said.
She’s 23. Hell, I’ve got blackheads older than that.
The generation gap at my work was illustrated the other day when another, ahem, older co-worker was talking about the Y2K bug.
For the benefit of those who were born in 2000 or after, the Y2K bug was a computer glitch that arose when someone worked out that computers wouldn’t cope when the date went from ’99 to ’00.
“People were really worried. It was a massive thing,” I said, joining in. “People started withdrawing money from their bank accounts and companies thought all their data would be wiped!” I said.
“It was the biggest thing ever but when midnight came, do you know what happened? “Nothing!”
I looked around and realised that the young people I worked with were struggling to rearrange their faces so I couldn’t tell they were sleeping with their eyes open.
The same thing happened when the twenty-somethings are forced to endure us oldies rave about working before the internet and mobile phones.
“Back then we had address books with all our contacts, and used the paper files in the library to find out things. And when we had to file something after hours we found a pay phone and read our story word by word to a lady back in the office,” I tell them, warming to my favourite old-person topic. “And I even worked at the Courier Mail in the early 1990s and had to drive across town to put my floppy disk in the mainframe computer!”
Hear that?
That’s the sound of the young people I work with realising how happy they are not to be me.
No doubt there’s a generation gap in play.
They say I look great “for your age”.
We think they look young enough to be still in high school.
They think we oldies go home every night and watch free-to-air TV and ring people on our landlines.
We think they can’t eat anything without taking a photo of it first and spend their off-work hours sending tweets about the climate emergency and ordering UberEats.
And you can always spot an older worker: our desks are covered with paper printouts.
Theirs have water bottles the size of a small car and healthy-looking pot plants.
A quick Facebook poll confirms many others my age have encountered blank looks when talking with younger people about using a Melways, sending telexes, why you need a pencil to fix a cassette tape or quoting from the movie The Castle.
And they have no idea why we say things like “Not happy Jan”, “Who are you going to call?” and “Phone home”.
Of course, young people wouldn’t look at Facebook unless their life depended on it.
Poor things, they have to sit around looking polite when we go on about the time when a lemonade icypole cost 15 cents in the school canteen and we had to choose between phone and internet.
They don’t remember back when cricketers got drunk on planes and had a ciggie at half time.
They don’t know all the famous people who die. Raquel who? And they remember key moments from our youth, like the movie When Harry met Sally, as a “old rom-com I’ve heard of but never seen”.
Now, I am some years off being able to forecast the weather by the creaking in my knees, but I do look at all the fresh-faced TV reporters marvel that they are old enough to have real jobs.
Scrolling through popular news sites for me is an exercise in futility.
What’s MAFS? Who’s Childish Gambino? And what’s the big deal about Love Island?
But I have to say I love working with so many young people. (Not that they’re likely to be reading this.) They’re smart, sassy and confident. They’re great with technology, socially aware and smart as hell.
A part of me would love to see them struggle in a workplace without mobile phones, internet search engines and auto-correct.
They, on the other hand, would love to see people like me text with our thumbs instead of index fingers, program our new iPhones and get 90,000 likes on Snapchat.