Sunday 7 January 2018

Caught between ages.

My generation are in an odd place of transition.

Last night I watched The Intern with Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway: the premise is that he's a 70 YO widower with 40 years experience at senior business level and she is a 30 something who has just started a business. He's lonely, drifting without a purpose any more, so takes a job as an intern working for her online clothing company. You want to know more, it's on Amazon prime.

My generation are in an odd place of transition, like I said. We aren't like the previous generation that DeNiro represents in the film, close to our parents generation, and we aren't the hip young things that have never known a time without google and email, text and facebook. We have aspects of both, strengths and weaknesses, but don't really fit in eaither category.

So I work for a company run by a CSO who is just about 40, where most graduate employees are the same age or younger than my children.

Most of the time I dress like I'm in business: shirt, trousers or smarter jeans. Sometimes I dress like 'them' in tee shirts with motifs, though none of my jeans have holes.

At lunchtime almost everyone in the office is on a mobile phone, chatting, surfing etc. I get out a laptop if I want to go online for personal stuff, where DeNiro would read a newspaper.

There was a point in the film where DeNiro opens an attache case on his desk, and one of the young guys is wowed by it. The description given is that it's from 1973, and they aren't made any more. A couple of weeks before Christmas I had a guitar with me in the car for a lesson after work, and didn't want to leave it outside in freezing conditions so brought it in. One of the other guys also plays, had a go and asked me about it, so I told him that it was from '82, making it older than all but 6 people in the company.

I'm not *quite* so much older that I'm the uncle/father figure, yet, but I'm also clearly not part of that younger group either.

It's an odd place of transition.

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