Old Kid on the Block

[penfield]

"I am like a book, with pages that have stuck together for want of use: my mind needs unpacking and the truths stored within must be turned over from time to time, to be ready when occasion demands."
- Seneca the Elder (Roman rhetorician and writer)


I've been working here at my company for just over nine years. It feels like just yesterday but it's a long time ago that I was sitting at a makeshift cubicle in the office lobby (instead of looking out my own personal office window at a gray brick wall).

I arrived fresh out of college -- with a total of three dress shirts, a goatee and a superiority complex -- and I was clearly a demographic outlier. My coworkers at the time (and still today) were middle-aged, middlebrow, middle-American functionaries of the political establishment. I think I was the first person to explain to most of them who "Britney Spears" was.

We had a birthday party today for one of my coworkers. She's in her 40s now, so she obviously belongs to the previous generation, but she nevertheless radiates a certain amount of cool. (This could be because she is black, or it could be because she has a teenaged daughter, or perhaps she and I have simply bonded over our mutual loathing of the office receptionist). Then again, there is no accounting for taste; she is a fervent fan of Celine Dion, who is practically incongruent with coolness.

So anyway, it was her birthday today. I'm not a huge fan of these enforced workplace celebrations because I never like the fluffy, fruity confections that people request for their birthday treat and also because I have so little in common with my coworkers. It used to be that the only time my perspective was solicited was when someone needed an authority on modern youth culture.

But I noticed a very subtle shift during the conversation today. Everyone was talking about their children, which was not unusual. But despite the wide-ranging discussion of generational disconnections (i.e., fashion, music, the college experience) nobody asked me for the youth perspective. Not once. I kept waiting for people to ask me, "you graduated not long ago -- was this your experience?"

But it was a long time ago, now. My experience has officially become irrelevant, at least insofar as my workplace goes, since I am too young to relate to my coworkers and too old to relate to their children. I am a man without a contemporary.

My only hope, to avoid total obsolescence, is that my bosses never figure out how to use their e-mail. As long as I still need to be called in to tell them how to include an attachment, my role is safe.

Comments

Re: "Old" Chick in the School

[enchanted-pants.livejournal.com]

Take it easy, you two. This is a no-hugging zone.