At Thanksgiving each year, I go to the home of a former coworker. He and his wife cook for their families and invite associates. My first Thanksgiving in DFW, I didn’t yet know many people and was more insistent to get home to Ohio for Christmas, so I worked on Thanksgiving, and he invited me over.
That’s now become a tradition. A tradition where I fit in so well, even though everyone else is at least 20 years my senior, I’m able to join them in complaining about how Kids Today are ruining everything.
At one point before dinner, we were all enjoying a drink. Naturally, the conversation turned to how millennials are the worst. We were discussing the Equifax data breach, and how it was, obviously, the fault of some stupid kid.
When the conversation got good, I took out my phone and started taking notes. I put everyone at ease by explaining my intentions, first. They were strangely supportive and started explaining why it was the fault of some stupid millennial. Never mind that I’m technically a millennial. It doesn’t matter.
“We don’t even teach millennials what it was like before everyone had to worry about identity theft,” one of my associates explained.
“Some millennial wouldn’t even know how to protect personal information,” I replied. “They just assume a computer will protect it.”
That led to a perfectly reasonable discussion about how The Man is monitoring people’s Google searches.
“What if I googled ‘Jim Jones’ and ‘Kool-Aid’ together just because I wanted to see what country it was in?” one associate asked. “Would a SWAT truck pull up outside my house?”
In this case, I took the position of Young Person, saying various law enforcement agencies have made clear to Reporter Scaia and other, less award-winning reporters, that if they were spying on everyone who used google, they’d never get anything else done. Instead, they look for “red flags” on message boards and might review search histories after the fact to make a case.
Later, a retired producer at one of the TV stations said he answered the phone in the newsroom one day. The call was for someone else, so he yelled across the room, “Some dame’s on the phone for you!”
He said someone else stood up and told him that was not appropriate, so he replied, “Some broad?”
And I told him I desperately wanted to adopt that story as my own.
For Black Friday, a group text with associates exposed my old mannery.
Some were visiting New York. Another was in Houston, so we were all chatting about trying to find Texas beer in the big city. One associate sent us a picture of him holding a Shiner, causing Liz to explain where he might find a Texas beer.
One associate managed to give a “thumbs down” to a text, causing me to question everything I thought I knew about the world. I had no idea you could feel ways about texts.
When Austin claimed responsibility for the thumbs down, I learned how to add how I feel about texts in the style of an old man.
I held my finger on his text and a menu popped up. This menu changed my life. An entire selection of ways to feel about things magically appeared, with thumbs and punctuation marks!
One of the broads on the group text gave me a quick walk-through. I was enamored of all the options. A whole new world had been opened up to me!
But this brave new world of feeling ways about texts also brought its own set of challenges.
Because I’m a gentleman, I wanted to reciprocate the heart. I didn’t want to add a heart to a different text, mind you, I just wanted to explain that I was a fan of someone else being a fan of one of my texts. You can see that explanation below.
And I’m just now seeing someone hearted the text where I explained that I just wanted to heart another heart, not get involved with an entirely different text. In conclusion, I feel like becoming an old man will be a pretty easy transition for me.
