OK Boomer

~ MaryG
Daily writing prompt
How has technology changed your job?
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As a recently-retired GenX elder (born in 1965–the first official GenX year), I am going to use this prompt to tell you a couple of stories about how we did things at my first job. You will probably find these stories boring, but that’s life. Older people will tell you their stories (repeatedly), regardless of their audience’s level of interest.

In the late 1980s, we had computers on our desks but no email or internet. So, if you wanted to put something into writing for others to see, you had to type it up in a Word document and then print it out on a ridiculously slow printer. “Memos” were written up like business e-mails are today, with the date (which you had to figure out yourself—people were always putting the wrong year on their memos in January and February), a “TO” line, a “FROM” line, a “SUBJECT” line, and a “CC” line. After you wrote and printed your memo, you had to initial it and then make Xeroxes (old timers called them “mimeographs”). Then you ran around the office, leaving your memo on peoples’ desks. As you can imagine, memos were used strictly for covering your ass, because otherwise, you’d just tell your co-workers whatever you wanted them to know.

Some people (me included) spent a great deal of time chit-chatting with co-workers throughout the day. One guy I worked with “made the rounds” ALL afternoon. After lunch, he went from office to office, desk to desk, cubicle to cubicle, trading information and gossip. He knew everything about everyone, which was very valuable back then. One person that everyone knew they needed to be liked by was the boss’s assistant (we called them secretaries back then). If the boss’s secretary didn’t like you, you were fucked. I once made the HUGE mistake of taking the boss’s secretary’s gift away from her during a Yankee Swap holiday gift exchange (which was my right, per the rules of the game). It was a salad spinner and I wanted it, but so did she! It took me months to get back on her good side. The so-called “soft skills” (reading a room, communicating, putting people at ease, small talk, empathy) were very important back then. Excel spreadsheets were non-existent.

So that’s how we rolled in the late 1980s…and don’t call me Boomer.

24 thoughts on “OK Boomer”

      2. Maybe because of remote/hybrid we’ve lost the camaraderie/family feeling at the office. (That was the upside of office politics – your work friends always had your back – and you knew exactly who they were)

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      3. Possibly. These days, even when people are onsite, they prefer to sit in their office with the door shut and do the meeting via Teams or Zoom instead of walking down the hall to get everyone in the same room. God forbid. 🙄

        It’s also been my observation that work friends these days are much quicker to stick one in your back if the opportunity presents itself. Those types have always been around, but the distancing we experience these days seems to make it easier for people to do it with nary a thought.

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      4. I agree. I found post-covid-Zoom-hybrid worklife to be toxic under a manager who had been tolerable before covid. The good part of work no longer outweighed the bad. It definitely contributed to my decision to retire early.

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      7. My mom was similar when she retired. She was happy as hell the second she got out lol
        I am always glad when someone can get out and enjoy the fruits of their labor. 👏

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  5. You are a few years older than me, but I remember how, in the 1980s with the explosion of the personal computer, we thought we were at the absolute pinnacle of human technology.

    Remember that time that we all thought the microwave oven was going to replace traditional gas or electric stoves? 😝

    We had no idea where technology was going to take us…

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  6. I was just reading that the latter years previously deemed as the Boomer Years , that is from 1954 to 1965, are now classified as Generation Jones.

    “The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a “keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness and the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, meaning a yearning or craving.”

    I just can’t keep up these days…?

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    1. Interesting! I’ve never heard of Generation Jones, but it does seem like there are younger boomers (like the Obamas) who really belong with GenX, culturally speaking.

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    1. Haha, good reel Vicki. You’re right – We did go digital quite easily! And nobody gave us a trophy or a medal or even a pat on the back … just let us smoke a joint in the bathtub in peace and we’re good.

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