Younger workers are often ignored by older workers. It’s assumed, taken completely for granted, that the life experience of the older workers will easily trump any knowledge or skills the younger people might have. This might lead one to wonder why, if life experience is so much more valuable than education, we insist that young people sacrifice the former for the latter … but that’s not my point today.
Today, I’m iconoclastically suggesting that young people may in fact have more experience with some parts of the job.
When I was young, so was the Internet. The older people with whom I worked were not stupid, not inexperienced, but they sometimes didn’t quite get the whole thing with computers and email and confusing electronic stuff like that. Here are a few gems I recall:
- “That page is too faded for OCR. You might want to retype it first.”
- “Giving the computer more memory will slow it down. It’ll just have
more memory to look through.”
And that all-time classic that more than a few of us heard …
- “We should download the worldwide web, so we can still use it when the Internet connection is down.”
All of these statements were ridiculous to anyone who understood the concepts. All of them seemed sensible based on the existing experience of the speakers: retyping a page was a way to get a cleaner typewritten copy, looking through sixteen physical cupboards does take more time than searching eight, and a downloaded item is still available when the Internet connection is out. All seemed sensible, and all were utterly absurd nonetheless.
They genuinely thought they were giving good advice. They were mistaken.
Time has passed, and now I’m the fogey. Like most such, I sometimes offer life tips to those less experienced. Unlike most such, I haven’t forgotten the experiences of my youth. If someone ignores my well-meant suggestion, it’s possible that she’s a smug little know-it-all who doesn’t understand how much wiser I am. It’s possible.
It’s also possible that the younger person knows this particular task better than I do, or that she performs this task once a year and rightly doesn’t care, or that there are newer methods of which I’m unaware … or maybe, just maybe, I’ve lost the plot and am spouting absurdities without knowing it.
I’m not the best judge of that. The person hearing the suggestion is the best judge of whether or not to take it. The ages of the parties involved don’t affect that.