Nobody Likes a Know-It-All, Especially an Old One - What if Younger Generations Have Something to Teach Us?

Baby boomers are guilty of having an attitude that there is nothing younger generations of women can teach us — aside from possibly tech. We’ve been there, done that, and we are the generation that made their lives so much better. I’m calling bullsh#t.

Thoughts from a Gen XerIn 2004, I was employed as a legal assistant (we were called legal secretaries back then) in a mid-sized law firm. We “old timers” would sit around the staff lunchroom and discuss how we would fix all the world’s problems should anyone ask. There were four or five of us in our core group, all 40-ish, except one in her 60s. A new staff hire, a 32-year-old woman I’ll call Sheila, had recently joined us. We may have been a pretty opinionated bunch, but we remained friendly and welcoming to new women. There were no male secretaries at that time.

I liked Sheila right off the bat. She was tenacious: divorced, raising three children on her own, and could easily pass for eighteen. In fact, she told us that when she bought lottery tickets, they would card her. Maybe she was bragging.

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
— American writer, Harlan Ellison

One day, the lunchroom conversation turned to movies. Sheila mentioned that over the weekend she had watched a new movie called Saw and commented on how much she had enjoyed it. If you aren’t familiar with this 2004 film, it’s a gory, violent, psychological horror.

Thinking I was an expert on cinema, I immediately piped in, “I’ve heard about that movie, and it sounds like garbage.” Without getting annoyed at my rather rude, off-the-cuff remark, Sheila said that if I happened to be a fan of the psychological horror genre, I might think otherwise. That shut me up. She was right. If I were a member of its target market, I would be in a position to rate it. This was the equivalent of a devoted opera fan being asked to comment on a British punk rock band. I was trashing a movie I had never seen and had no interest in.

It appeared Sheila was more astute than I had given her credit, and I found myself taking an interest in what this Gen Xer had to say.

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