Those of you who know me know my rants about millenials. We’re blamed for ruining them with the invention of the “participation trophy” — awarding them for simply showing up (and often even if they didn’t). We’re blamed for ruining them by allowing their use of technology at young ages, so they don’t speak and can’t figure anything out without the aid of their cellphones. (Some far-off day, in generations yet to come, humans will have evolved to the point where children are born with the phone attached to their hands. Might as well, since they don’t use them for anything but typing anyway!) We’re told we coddled and spoiled them, never pushing them nor preparing them for life outside the home.

This was the subject at a lunch I attended at a recent technology conference. One of the people at the table was a Gen-X woman who said she works at the company “that gives you wings!” I had to ask the guy sitting next to me on the other side. He didn’t know either. Eventually, someone at the table identified the company as Red Bull. The drink of millenial champions!

Anyway, I was telling this GenXer, who lives squarely between boomers like myself and the millenials, about an email exchange I had with an employee. Here’s how the exchange went. Worker: “WFH.” Me: “WFH? WTF?” Worker: “LOL! Working from home.”

I was railing about how that’s not part of our company policy. The GenXer interrupted. “So, what’s wrong with working from home?” I said, how is it that someone can just decide not to come into the office on any given day? We have an office so we can work collaboratively, exchange ideas, in the hopes that all of us thinking about the same things will come up with something better than any of us could come up with alone.

But now that I think about it, when they’re at work, millenials just plug in headphones and don’t talk anyway. I have to wave semaphores while jumping up and down to get them to look up.

The woman next to me said, “Well, don’t you use Slack, or Teams, for collaboration?” I replied that we do use Slack (it’s an application for sharing projects, messages, comments.. basically, a collaboration platform.) “So, what’s the problem,” she asked. “Haven’t you ever been Slacked? (The problem is, the verb “to slack” means to do less than is required. Hey, a perfect fit for millenials!!)

But I fumfurred a bit, and then blurted out, “Because that’s just not how we work.”

That’s when I realized that I’ve become my Dad… or worse .. Tevye! (See: “Fiddler on the Roof”) “We work this way because we’ve ALWAYS worked this way. It’s TRADITION!”

Then I had another epiphany, right after I had a delicious chocolate-y mini-tort thing with melted dark and white chocolate inside, with marshmallow and a Hershey’s square on top … Whoa! Almost lost the train of thought there.

The epiphany was this. I am old and set in my ways. The millenials simply work differently than I do, and I am the one not changing and keeping up with the times. Studies show that in the next decade or so, more people will work from home than go into offices. In fact, they say, if you offer that arrangement now, you’ll attract better talent!

As for not figuring things out without technology, well, why is that bad? As long as they can find the answer, does it matter if they thought of it on their own or Googled it? And the fact that they know how to use all this tech means they can do things in a minute that would take me an hour!

I never thought of myself as unchanging, and stuck in the past. I know what “finsta” and “Snapchat” and “Pandora” are. But today was a realization, and one I didn’t particularly care for. I think I’ll go online and buy one of those new robotic bartending machines and have it fix me a strong one!