experience

You know how it is.

You get out of college and you know it all. Those geezers that hired you? They don’t know anything.  They’re fossils, and ungrateful fossils at that because they pay you next to nothing and you “know” that you’re worth so much more. So you sit in front of your monitor try to do as little as possible and try to make it to Friday.  Friday night when your real life begins.

Flash forward 20 years, and you have a 20 something asking you how to send a fax, or how to fill out their weekly time sheet.

“Does this look right?”

“What am I supposed to do for this?”

“When do I qualify for vacation time?”

All those inane and ridiculous questions that you’ve conveniently forgotten that you once asked when you were their age.  Every day, and it just keeps getting worse and worse.

When did I become the “old man”? The one that people come to with questions, the one that people needed an opinion from, the one who is an authority on so many topics?

I suddenly look down.  I’m wearing a button down shirt, pressed pants, hard sided shoes, and to top it all off I shaved. I’ve become one of “them”!

When I was starting out I did my job, I tried sneaking out early or sneaking in late. Now I have to ask them why they came in late and are they working late to make up for it, and I need them to do it cause we have a lot to do, and they need to be here.

Funny thing is that I try to look calm, thoughtful, and wise. On the inside I’m panicking, confused and dazed. I wonder if it was like that for the old men when they were my age.  Has it been the same thing for every generation of office worker since this whole lifestyle began back in the 19th century?  Will it continue to be this way in the future?  Is that good or bad?

Time for me to go and pretend I know what I’m talking about…