I heard a supervisor criticize an employee today by saying this:
He was born in 1960.
As if that criticism sums everything up! The person he said this to laughed and proceeded to give examples of why a person born that long ago could have no understanding of our mobile phone industry today.
I couldn't believe it when I heard it. If only he'd written this criticism down in an email then maybe I could do something about it.
8 comments:
Wonder what he would have said of somebody like, dunno, Steve Jobs, since he was born in 1955...
Great point! thanks Virgi
To be fair, that supervisor is doing a job that someone else needs and wants and could do better. There is nothing about the attitude that cannot be fixed with a P45
Old dogs & new tricks, lot's of people believe it so it must be true... right?
I think this is to be expected in a youth-centric society. "Youth", of course, being defined as the current young generation, and "old" as defined as anyone their parents' ages.
My Modest Proposal: let's kill all the sassy young techno-wizards and go back to plain ol' black rotary-dial phones.
I say, let's kill anyone born AFTER 1960. They sound like a lot of techie-wankers to me.
I might mention this to personnel at some point but I'll need to put my hearing aid in and get into my wheelchair and amble on over to their office.
I could dismiss his remark as a silly thing a 30 year old might say but it's kind of stuck in my mind that this is his attitude and it could affect me.
You could raise it in a hypothetical "How should I handle this scenario" way
I wish I'd saved an article I read recently, to send to you. It was written by a woman of brilliant, ripened, wise years (OUR AGE) who was a team manager for some marketing agency in NYC. Bottom line: she was putting together one of those "team building" outings, and she chose a nicely catered Hudson River cruise---food, booze, camaraderie, all that schmeer---and when she presented it to the group, she gaily sang, "A THREEEE_hour tour!"
Blank stares from the thirty-somethings. But she persisted.
"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip---" she trilled, but all the while sensing she was rapidly losing her audience.
The gist of the artice was, for managers "our age," we should not assume the Bright Young Things know the lyrocs to the "Gilligan's Island" theme, and to use such dated references makes us seem OLD.
As if that's a bad thing!:)
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