I spent many years working in a school that served kids in pre-kindergarten up to 8th grade. 4 year olds to 13/14 year olds. I started working there when I was 22. As the years went on and I got older, I swear the kids got younger. By the time I left, I felt a lot older than the 41 years I actually was. Teaching kids has a way of doing that. Especially the middle school kids. Good grief! They loved to make fun of my improper, cringey use of popular slang and lack of knowledge of whatever happened to be on TikTok that week. And I loved to make fun of their lack of knowledge of basic life processes, like using a camera with film in it or making a phone call on a landline. I found myself saying “Oh my god, really?!” a lot! To be fair, they said it to me too. Fast forward to the time I started my new job. I still work in a school, though it’s a community college and the students are much older, especially in my specific department. I thought I had put the younger generations behind me and I could breathe easy knowing I wasn’t going to go home feeling old because some young kids made fun of me for being older than Google. That is, until I met my secretary.
I love my secretary. She only works part-time which really sucks because she’s really good at what she does! She knows exactly how everything works and is always a few steps ahead of what needs to get done as I have been catching on to all the different processes and procedures. However, she’s 22. Much like my former students, she was born in the post-9/11 era. One day she was excitedly telling me about a concert she went to and I had only vague recognition of who the artist was. She enthusiastically rattled off names of songs and I had absolutely no idea about any of them. There may have been one that I sort of recognized because it had been played a thousand times on the radio. I was immediately reminded of my younger self trying to connect with my mother over music in this very way. Me trying to tell her about some artist and her having no idea who I was talking about.
But, it goes both ways. Which brings me to this new series of posts. I discovered today (yesterday really) that she (and our supervisor for that matter who is only about 10 years older than her) don’t know what soap operas are! I don’t think they’re on tv anymore, and I never watched them, but I at least knew what they were, what they were about, and the names of them! I could even probably match up the theme song to the proper title. She had no concept of it. I recently discovered that she is a huge fan of “The Office” which I am only just now watching through for the first time. So when the senior secretary (who is close to my age) told me yesterday that she had to educate my secretary about soap operas, I asked her today if she ever watched “Friends”. She had and then I tried to connect soap operas to the fact that Joey’s character played on “Days of Our Lives”. She thought it was made up! When I told her that “Days of Our Lives” was a real soap opera, she then exclaimed that “Joey was really on that show?!” Oh no. I then had to explain that “Days of Our Lives” was a real show but Joey Tribbiani’s character—Dr. Drake Ramoray—was a fictional character that Joey on “Friends” played on the show but never played on the real “Days of Our Lives”. Oy! I could see where she would be confused. It was kind of surreal trying to explain it.
Of course, the whole conversation with her today started because I made a reference to the name Debbie and connected it to the 80s. When I saw the blank look on her face I knew that Debbie Gibson was out of her realm of understanding. I had to tell her that Debbie Gibson was sort of the Brittney Spears of the 80s. Come to think of it, Brittney Spears is kind of pushing the generational envelope too.
It almost makes me glad she’s part time, now that I think about it. I need those two days a week that she doesn’t work to recover from the horrifyingly fast aging I feel I’m going through when I talk to her about things she knows nothing about.
Stay tuned, I’m sure there will be many more parts to this series.
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