Yesterday I had to go to the AT&T store to activate my phone. Why? Because since the AT&T merger with DirecTV their website has become a cluttered cesspool of junk. That speaks volumes considering their website has always been bogged down with useless information. It took multiple search engine alterations to navigate their website to find the sim card activation page. After a few attempts of trying to enter my information I finally resigned myself to trudging to their store.
The only reason I even tolerate AT&T’s website is because I hate going to their store and dealing with my own age group. It might come as a surprise to many, but I can’t be bothered with Millennials working in tech stores. There’s too many haphazard sales pitches and bullshit techno worship from my own generation related to technology. I don’t care about the latest model of the exact same phone I already own because it’s a bit thinner or the screen is slightly wider.
But, this trip was different…
The AT&T store I went to was employed with middle aged women. After a quick scan I realized nobody behind the counter was under the age of fifty. The woman who entered my information was quick and efficient. There wasn’t any finger pecking on her tablet as I would’ve expected. She knew all the plans and the best way to set up my new account. I was out of the store in five minutes with no problems.
After I thought about it I wasn’t really surprised by this observation. Over the past few years I’ve noticed older generations have not only caught up to Millennials regarding technology, but have actually surpassed them in many ways.
That’s right. The Millennials are not the most tech savvy generation anymore. While we’ve been the early adopters over the past 15 years our elders have left us in the dust. Not only do they now understand the bells and whistles of new technology. They have the hard skills desperately need to put it to practical use.
This was a trend I noticed during the 2016 election. Most of my age group didn’t know Breitbart News existed until after the election. I didn’t even pay any attention to Breitbart News until I saw Kellyanne Conway on Fox News talking about “the forgotten man”. That’s when my ears instantly perked up. I knew the reference was from the book “The Forgotten Man” written by Amity Shales about the Great Depression and the author was in the documentary “Generation Zero”.
After I realized Trump’s campaign strategist was Steven Bannon who directed the documentary I knew exactly what was happening. In the last weeks of the election I was tuned into Breitbart News as they lived streamed Trump visiting multiple states in the same day. While the Democratic Party was being forced to plan last minute trips to Michigan and Pennsylvania in a desperate attempt to keep up. But, it was too late for them.
Donald Trump had a very aggressive campaign strategy in the final weeks leading up to the election. In the final weekend he made nine campaign stops in multiple states to hold campaign rallies in airport hangers spaced two hours apart. The next day he made seven campaign stops in the battleground states and ended his campaign in Michigan after midnight. All his rallies were being live streamed on Breitbart and Youtube while the mainstream media prattled on about poll predictions.
Meanwhile the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign were running the same offense as Barack Obama’s campaign without realizing times had changed since he first ran for President in 2008. The same social media strategy that was used to target the Millennial voting demographic was now being used against them by Donald Trump’s campaign in favor of their parent’s generation.
Gramma would have been in charge of the world if she’d only had an IPhone.
I’m glad you still consider those of us over fifty “middle-aged”.
Yes, some of us doddering and decrepit old fucks actually invented all of the doodads that millennials can’t seem to take their faces out of.
Or wait, I forget… wasn’t it that Zuckerberg kid that invented the Internet?
Al Gore. See. It was the old guys.
That was Algore… Jeesh, you have the Olztimers’ going on.
I actually met and had breakfast with one of the two guys who “invented” the Internet, at least the TCP/IP it runs on. His name is Vint Cerf and last I heard he was one of the high mucky mucks at Google.
Regarding your adventure at AT&T, Steph, my wife & I weren’t so lucky. I caught them fraudulently billing my credit card for several months in a row. Their website said I was paying one price, but the credit card statement was about $15 higher per month. Millennials galore at the store I visited, not a middle-ager in sight. The rep we met with was very knowledgeable, but he still had to call up Bangladesh or India, or wherever the decision maker is located, and it took about an hour and a half of sitting on hold before he dug out a “backdoor” number and got us a credit….but that took another 1/2 hour. While sitting there wasting time the rep tried to upsell us on their marvelous AT&T/Direct TV plan and I told him it was far more likely I would be switching my plan to T-mobile; certainly was not in the mood for experiencing more of the “Bangladesh” treatment.
His response was “T-mobile has Bangladesh too”.
I am over 50 and work in “IT” at a fortune 100 company. I have watched for years in horror as my employer and many like it have made the tragic assumption that the “kids” coming out of college for the last decade forward are naturally technologically sophisticated and don’t need to be trained in technology per se, we can just deploy it and they will intuitively pick it up. Nothing could be further from the truth !! Sure, the kids who have STEM degrees largely fit that belief, but that is a minority of the kids coming out college. The majority who do not have STEM degrees are very well versed in social media and the all the trendy “chats” & “grams”, but not much more than that. In other words, they are very proficient in those aspects of technology that waste an employers time and lead them to make dumb decisions that literally get them fired. I have seen two cases in just the last few months that stupidity with a cell phone led to termination. Technology is a tool to increase your productivity so you are worth the salary you are being paid, but few young folks today fully grasp that concept. Tragically, many have a false sense of smug sophistication about them that is not warranted by their performance. A couple years ago I was involved in a situation where one of these young kids kept a web screen open with one of his online fantasy games and played it all day ! He would minimize the screen, and his employer got 2o minutes or so and then he played his game for a bit and went back and forth all day doing that. He was totally put out that his employer found this arrangement unsatisfactory !! I wonder what his resume looks like now??
My new boss told me all but ONE of the millennial’s he’s hired take weeks to pick up what the other lady (a millennial) and I had in just two days.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1461452/girl-electrocuted-bathtub-phone-charging/
Well, if they can automate the cars and traffic, can’t someone automate the jobs?
Yes, is underway currently, ‘robot’ ordering kiosk going in now, burger flippers, brick laying robots in R&D testing.
My problem with “tech” is that it’s very tinker-unfriendly. You can’t play with it to see exactly how it works unless you are already tech-savvy. Once it’s screwed up, you can’t ever get it right again. I can manage to post to a website without any problem though. I tend to be several steps behind what is trending. I still have a “dumb” phone, for instance.
I have an absolute aversion to technology on vehicles.
The intake manifold gasket change on my new ’99 Chevy truck took me 10 hours, while my old ’92 took 3.
Won’t even touch the rat’s nest under the wife’s ’14 Captiva.
Next truck is going to be ’70s to early ’80s.
Yeah…the “newer” cars ARE nightmares….I’ll take a 70/80’s model anyday. I got a 2003 Nissan Frontier that the brake lights went on one day. Find out there is a plastic “plug” that pushes against the brake switch when in rest…turning of the brake lights. You have to be a contornist and have 7 hands and plenty of light to fix it. I put a STEEL bolt in it finally with a nut. Works like a charm. The dealer told me he charges 25 dollars for the plastic plug and .75 hrs labor to pop it in. My cost….10 cents
Greetings,
I think that people my age (I’m 50) came up in the digital age during a time when things were a lot more hands on. I know how a computer works because I must have put together more than 20 of them over the years. I also have a solid frame of reference because I worked with mainframe computers and then had to hack my way through the very early personal computers used in business. I could run DOS like no other.
A foundation like that helps when dealing with modern computers and their issues. I can’t tell you how many excellent working laptops I’ve acquire from my daughter’s friends who just thrown them away if they cook a hard drive or the machine scrambles its operating system. They have no clue as to what is under the hood. They just paw at it and that’s it.
So you’re telling me the future of the US economy is dependent on us dying old folks? Well as I sit here in the hospital recovering from my Hernia repair operation I am pleased with the millennials I have encountered during my time here.I can say with certainty if you get sick and have to stay in the hospital for any length of time your primary care provider will be millennials.So you might order show some respect. Meatheads!!!
Hey Beebs hope you’re on the mend this time. Sending best wishes from right coast.
And yes they ( millennials ) are the ones giving me all the good drugs .Like Oxycodone and Gabapentin. Can’t feel a thing.
Does Gabapentin work? My husband gets that from the Veterans Administration monthly, I think. It just showed up a few months after he had some bloodwork done with a note to take no more than three daily as needed for pain or muscle ache. We don’t know what he has but we keep the bottles in the freezer in case we get pain or muscle ache we can’t “handle” on our own.
Mrs nkit bought me a bag of Peanut M&Ms last Christmas.. I’m not sure how they found peanuts that small. Easter came and she bought jelly beans that looked like jelly peas…Fuck these assholes..is nothing sacred?
I learned Fortran in the summer between junior high and high school, that would be … 1973? I bought my first Apple IIe in 1982; picked up Lotus 1-2-3 because I wanted to at work in about 1984. Learned R:base a couple of years later, same way. I used a Compaq luggable to tune control loops in an oil refinery in 1988; over the years I’ve learned lots of industrial automation, process simulation programs and various apps, add-ons and workarounds. This last February I picked up VBA for Excel (and other uses) from a book. You have to keep learning, folks keep inventing new (and useful) tricks.
Fortran, don’t get me started. I have been programming for 32 years. It was my first language in school. I last touched it maybe in 1991 until, last week. I had to dig up a Fortran compiler to make changes to some code last touched at my Company in 1995.
I was talking to some co-workers (all H1B) that have been in the industry less than 10 years. 2 had heard of it and wanted to see, another did not know that it existed.
I have noticed a certain trend in our culture to simply accept the newest step in the technology EXPLOSION no matter how much it intrudes upon their right to privacy.
My father used to come home with chads in the cuffs of his pants after spending the day coding COBOL on a Univac. Back then the job of de-bugging involved removing actual bugs from inside the computer.
Now he helps witless tattoo covered 20 somethings find tahini for their falafels.
People always try and write off their elders because competency scares them the way firesticks frightened the natives.
It also shows how this social media/shiny new phone bullshit added nothing of value to the American workforce. Sure, a few people are able to monetize blogs and youtube channels on the internet. For the most part, it didn’t create the same type of jobs as IBM’s contracts in the 1930’s when they created over a million jobs when their processors were used by FDR’s administration while implementing Social Security. At the time they called it the largest bookkeeping job in history.
I am on some social/business media and like some of the tech articles. And, have been putting myself out for freelance/employee work doing Admin, Procurement, CSR, Data Entry and so forth. Not one serious reply; had two “replies” that came from phony companies. I was learning about my first computer system (Xerox-PARC) before most of the current “hot-shots” were born.
Don’t give up, Edward. All my life the good jobs I landed were the result of hours of conversations with the right people and a good dose of being in the right place at the right time.
Largest book-cooking conjob in history
Learned COBOL on my first job at NY Tel. Chads in my pants cuffs, too.
Built my first computer with parts ordered from a paper catalog I sent away for. 286 machine Dos 3.0. Learned basic with a Timex Sinclair 1000 and an Apple 2E at the community college. Also 6502 assembler language there. My first cell phone had a telescoping whip antenna. The Geek Squad doesn’t impress me. I still work in technology at 68, and still could find a high pay job anywhere I go. The schools today are a disaster, not preparing most for the high tech world we live in. Most importantly, the young are not taught independent, critical thinking and basic problem solving techniques. They are not shown how to master a subject or concept on their own, without reliance on a broken educational system. Of course there are exceptional individuals who rise above the obstacles and shine on their own talent, but many have taken the easy path of a liberal arts education and massive student loan debt.
Robert (QSLV)
My parents have slowed down a bit, they are 93. My dad was always tech savvy. Worked for the FAA until 1980. He would buy HP calculators in the 1970’s at $400+ a pop, and when the first PC’s came out, got a North Star Horizon, he paid around $3500 for in 1978’ish. He fired the thing up, started trying to write some Basic code and ran out of memory (it has 128K of RAM). He then bought another 128K for $450.
Anyway, the folks maintained a genealogy website until a couple of years ago, when they needed to scale back for health reasons. They have smart phones and do email and texting on them.
Some older folks are quite tech savvy….
It’s a misconception that the young are more tech savvy. They aren’t. My nephews consider being able to click on the play button in youtube as being technically proficient. They have no idea how to even setup a router. There is something that I do find amazing. They refuse to read directions in games, and simply find out how the game works completely through trial and error.
It’s easier to grasp something when you’ve assembled one of the first personal computers, played with them (I mean programming) and done almost anything what you could do with it.
Today technology is so advanced and such a broad field it is hard for newcomers to understand basic principles.
So of course it’s easier for people like me with a 35+ years IT background to learn a new thing, because it’s more or less the same as the old stuff, just another “flavor”. The newcomer has no experience. But if they hang in there and don’t see it as easy task which they could learn in a week or two they can master it.
In direct comparison those who have already experience will always beat the newcomers. Why? Because of experience! You can learn theory in a short amount of time. But to understand it takes longer. And experience just comes over a period of years of work.
This is btw. no technical related problem only. Just watch a store clerk when he must ask a manager because he can’t do anything when a customer comes with a specific problem outside the normal process system. It is a process problem!