These are the people who at every opportunity – for like 20 years and goin’ strong! – have felt the need to point out how stupid and lazy we are. How education has left us all behind and we were too absorbed in our ‘vidya games and that there internet’ to even notice, bunch of brainwashed easy street slackers that we are. But let us paint their generation with such a broad brush, and all the sudden it’s not just cute forty-something wit, but scathing invective.

The truth is, these posters sound like the people I work with. Who wouldn’t know how to use a mouse if they didn’t have me there saying, “Okay, now you point at the little X and click” (“Uh, do I ‘Double Click’? No, you don’t. Just do it the way I said so I can get back to my own work, please.)

They want to call our whole generation stupid when they could never even set the clock on a microwave, without some benevolent corporate hand to guide them through the process. (Take the guy above who is unhappy with the service he pays nothing for: “…I don’t see where there is a ‘help’ or ‘set of rules how to work’ area.” They need a set of rules and are afraid of the machine without one.

That’s why I respect their parent’s generation more than theirs. Those people figured out a thing if they didn’t know how to do it. Or, they just figured out a workaround. Those Great Generation folks may not have known how to do something, but they were not pretentious/conceited enough to pretend that they do. That they must. That they will give you twenty dollars, if you’ll just show them how to do it… So our little “hobbies” aren’t so worthless after all, I guess.

Sean C.’s post was spot on and, though I was nearly in tears laughing at it, you are right about one thing: for those crafty boomers smart enough to read between the lines, everything they need to know is there.

And if he takes a few jabs here and there at that Old Fogie Paranoia that you can sit there and condemn, but that you cannot deny exists, the who’s to blame him?