Your age is showing. No way around it, that’s a cringey feeling when you’re over 45 in tech. And no matter how great your team is, no matter how many inclusion policies your company boasts of, if you’re working in a company dominated by millennials and gen z-ers, you’re going to be painfully aware of your age from time to time. And in general, it doesn’t feel good.
In my novel Employee 6 Is 54, I wanted to drop the reader into some of these situations, to experience or relate to that uncomfortable moment of feeling old beyond your actual years.
Below I’ve excerpted four passages from the book when the main character is faced with the reality of the workplace age gap. To set the scene, the main character, Jillian Johnson, joins an early-stage startup after a long career in hotel sales. Thus begin her your-age-is-showing moments. Roll scene:
When you realize you’re a half-step behind in technology.
On Jillian’s first day of work, she mistakenly assumes the company has processes in place, such as for onboarding new employees. Not so. She also considers herself technology-literate because she is perfectly competent using Microsoft Office. And then learns she is no longer to be an Office gal.
“By the way, do you have an onboarding process?” she asked as she entered.
He stopped. “What do you mean?”
“I just thought there may be a series of meetings. Or ways for me to get up-to-speed quickly.”
Clearly this hadn’t occurred to him.
“Well, I did have Alex get you on the accounts – G Suite, Slack, Jira, Mailchimp.” He seemed proud of that and it allowed him to save face a bit. “Alex will show you how to log in.”
“What, no Outlook?” she asked.
Desmond laughed, and then she did too, pretending she’d been sarcastic.
When your colleagues use Slack instead of talking to each other.
Jillian has never worked in a WeWork office space before, with everyone clustered in the same small room. So on her first day, she is surprised to find that no one speaks. Conversations are apparently typed into Slack, which she has just logged into for the first time.
Slack notifications began popping up. She hesitated a moment before she clicked on one and read a thread between Trevor and Alex. Then some chatter about a feature Trevor and Nate were working on. This amused her, since the developers all sat within a few yards of each other, minus the remote guy. Yet, the only sound in the room was keyboards clicking and occasionally a chair rolling back.
She sighed.
When you feel out of place at a team-building event.
Jillian dreads the team-building experience the company has planned at a virtual reality game venue. They will do a pirate-themed escape room in VR. The rest of the team is clearly jazzed about what is to come. But not Jillian.
Alex and Nate gave each other high-fives like they were going to rule this game. These guys had no doubt played more games concerning pirates in the last year than she had in her lifetime. Which was zero. Of course, she had one thing up on them, she thought: she’d been on Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride before they were even born. Actually, before Johnny Depp was born. Back when it was just a ride, and not yet a ride-turned-into-a-movie. Maybe that counted for something. Of course it didn’t, but it amused her.
When your cultural references date you.
Jillian is telling her twenty-something colleague that she loves the bar they’ve met at to discuss their secret work digging into the company’s financial improprieties.
“We could have stayed at WeWork and had a beer,” Trevor said. “For free.”
“Yeah, but there we couldn’t scheme to find our Deep Throat. We needed the cover of a dark bar.”
“Deep Throat?”
Was he…blushing? Jillian did a quick calculation. Trevor wasn’t even alive for Watergate. But oh, no! He most likely thought of the reference as porn. Now she was blushing, too. She dug deep for some indignation. “Watergate? Woodward and Bernstein’s informant? All the President’s Men? Stream it on Netflix.”
You can find Employee 6 Is 54 at Amazon.com. You can also download the first chapter of Employee 6 Is 54, here.