![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Old people are the future
For the uninitiated: I live in a medium-sized rural Australian town. I don't have much to do with people around my age, because they work and live in different circles and I'm not interested in sports or drinking, the two main pastimes in this town. (Also I'm a borderline hikkikomori and their conversations keep throwing me into Single Female Nerd Rage but anyeeewaaaay). I'm more exposed to the older people that my mother works with. I'm pretty chillaxed, but honestly, they're starting to wear me down.
The incident when this became evident still makes me too angry to type about it so I'll stick with this morning. I dropped by the local library and was initiated into a conversation, and the lady I had been introduced to led in with 'I heard you're a computer whizz! Now the thing about young people these days is that they're so clever!'
I was expecting her to wrangle computer advice out of me and her statement took me by surprise. I haven't heard any person in her age bracket or above state anything so positive about young people since I moved here.
And then she went on to describe how using computers made everything easier and you don't have to be as accurate any more.
I'm not sure that she intended it as a backhanded compliment. I tried explaining that we know what we're raised with, poorly, with a silly anecdote about being flummoxed when confronted with a manual twin-tub washing machine, but she just didn't seem to get it.
The amount of ranting and raving about young people and modern society and how much easier I have it that than they do, that they subject me to with no irony whatsoever, is astounding. Yeah yeah the 'walked in the snow uphill both ways' thing has been a tradition since ancient Greece, but some of them essentially insult me to my face.
Why do they do it? Do they think I'm a bubblegum-chewing punk? (Never mind the fact I'm closer to 30 than 20...) Do they not realise how rude they sound? Am I the youngest person around and I don't immediately make a getaway so they assume I'm fair game to listen to their grievances?
Then another old person who I had been assured was an intellectual burst into the library, asked where the porn was and told an illegal immigrant joke and SIGH... Maybe I'll illegally immigrate to Victoria, hide out under Stush's cats.
I should friends-lock this I guess, but considering everyone in this town keeps saying they're so crap with computers...
The incident when this became evident still makes me too angry to type about it so I'll stick with this morning. I dropped by the local library and was initiated into a conversation, and the lady I had been introduced to led in with 'I heard you're a computer whizz! Now the thing about young people these days is that they're so clever!'
I was expecting her to wrangle computer advice out of me and her statement took me by surprise. I haven't heard any person in her age bracket or above state anything so positive about young people since I moved here.
And then she went on to describe how using computers made everything easier and you don't have to be as accurate any more.
I'm not sure that she intended it as a backhanded compliment. I tried explaining that we know what we're raised with, poorly, with a silly anecdote about being flummoxed when confronted with a manual twin-tub washing machine, but she just didn't seem to get it.
The amount of ranting and raving about young people and modern society and how much easier I have it that than they do, that they subject me to with no irony whatsoever, is astounding. Yeah yeah the 'walked in the snow uphill both ways' thing has been a tradition since ancient Greece, but some of them essentially insult me to my face.
Why do they do it? Do they think I'm a bubblegum-chewing punk? (Never mind the fact I'm closer to 30 than 20...) Do they not realise how rude they sound? Am I the youngest person around and I don't immediately make a getaway so they assume I'm fair game to listen to their grievances?
Then another old person who I had been assured was an intellectual burst into the library, asked where the porn was and told an illegal immigrant joke and SIGH... Maybe I'll illegally immigrate to Victoria, hide out under Stush's cats.
I should friends-lock this I guess, but considering everyone in this town keeps saying they're so crap with computers...