these boomers don’t wanna work anymore!
The title is poking fun at the type of person at work that implies young people are lazy while doing jack shit too, and I use ‘Boomer’ colloquially, meaning not just the late ones born 1955–1964, but also the some of the early Gen Xers born 1965–1970.
The young people don’t wanna work anymore, huh? You know what makes me not wanna work anymore, too? Shocking behavior of the residual boomers at the workplace. Seems like everyone has some sort of horror story about their coworkers who are close to retirement.
Many outearn the others at work due to seniority, more opportunities to negotiate, or having joined during better conditions ages ago… but now do less than anyone else. E-Mails? Not responding. Calls? Not picking up. Office? Is constantly on a break. It’s often faster to just do it yourself than involve them.
A new way to do things? “We have never done it that way!”
Why do we do it this way? “We have always done it that way!”
New tech? Refusal. “I only have 1-3 years left! Why should I learn that?”
Their memory is bad, so they’ll insist on a topic never having been brought up before. “We’ve never discussed this!” meanwhile, protocol says they agreed to it in the last meeting or even brought it up themselves.
You give them documents to read over, they skip half, then write an angry comment about how that half is missing. Their Word annotations are cryptic. Their angry emails with 50 exclamation points and red and cursive capslock turns out to be because of their own mistake. They won’t apologize, though.
They call you over to solve a tech problem. You see 99 unread emails in their inbox. Next time you talk to them about a topic that was shared via mail, they smile. “Oh I didn’t read any of that. I just deleted it.” They laugh. Okay then.
Good luck getting the boomer to understand absences. You are sick or on vacation and return to missed-but-redirected 10 calls and 5 angry emails that pretend you’re just ignoring them. Meanwhile, they’re ignoring the shared Outlook calendar, your Outlook out-of-office message, your redirected phone number, your Teams status, and your absence note on your office door. But how could they have known, right? It’s your fault.
When they happen to take over your work during your absence, you return to more work than you started with, because half the procedures they took over have some documents missing, deadlines missed or other mistakes and you spend the first day back at work correcting that. But beware of having a simple accidental typo - the boomer will let you know, with the boss in CC.
It’s the 15th of December, 9-10 days until Christmas, 16 days until NYE. While everyone else keeps working and tries to get stuff done before the year ends, the year has already ended for the boomer. “Why are you coming to me with this? It’s literally the end of the year. We should discuss it in January.” Now your shit is stalled because someone doesn’t wanna make a small decision like where and if a specific document should be saved. You wouldn’t even ask if they didn’t insist on micromanaging the place at the weirdest times.
Those types of boomers are also successful in delegating work they don’t want to do. They get others to fix the tech for them, to call the IT department for them, to up- or download and zip or unzip files for them, even to rename files for them. It’s incredible. Things they were doing just fine years ago already. They know how to weaponize incompetence. These are people who once finished degrees or even a doctorate, but now cannot deal with text.
And everyone tiptoes around it. “That’s just how they are! We can’t change them. Just do it for them.”
I understand aging poses challenges and I will experience those too, but not every boomer is that way, and people can do better! I see some smart, engaged, passionate and focused older people at work, too. They’re competent, they aren’t learning to be helpless, they put in the work. They don’t act entitled or like 40 years of work were enough to now free them from all responsibility or scrutiny. If you treat yourself like you’re too old and stupid for everything, it’s going to become true in the worst way. Don’t let yourself get left behind.
I am just so tired, man. I am tired of being overruled and outearned by people who are very openly hostile to work in a way that negatively affects everyone else. And it’s these same people who wanna tell you that the younger generation doesn’t wanna work anymore and that they, of all people, should earn even more. Fuck off, you know this place would be on fire without everyone cleaning up behind you.
Reply via email
Published