Well it’s finally happened, I’ve crossed over from being the ‘young’ generation to being one of the ‘older’ generations.
Alright, in all fairness that probably happened a little while ago but not having spent a lot of time around young people I’ve been able to live in blissful ignorance. That is until I started living with one full-time.
I’ve come to realise that, in time, my son is going to have the same type of reactions to my stories of ‘days gone by’ that I had to my parent’s stories which I’m sure is the same reaction they had to their parent’s stories and so forth and so forth.
You know the rolling of the eyes and bemused facial expressions that roughly translate to ‘Good on ya Mum’
It strikes me that, as is usually the case, the stories that are going to elicit the strongest reactions and make me seem ‘so old‘ to my son are those that involve technology.
We chuckle about the fact that the technology that our son is going to come to take for granted hasn’t even hit the mainstream yet and I don’t mind telling you that’s just a little bit weird. My husband and I are both reasonably technologically savvy (my husband probably a little bit more than me) and like to keep up-to-date with new technologies but it’s an inescapable truth that at some stage, in the not so distant future, our son is going to far surpass our understanding of technology and the student will inevitably become the teacher. Hopefully that day is still a little way away but like it or not it is coming.
There’s no denying you’ve moved up the generational ladder when you start reminiscing about ‘how things were in your day’ and when you start looking at the kids of today thinking to 
yourself ‘we were never like that’. When I see kids who look like they’re about 7 pulling out the latest smart phones I can’t help but be a little bit amazed. Never mind the kid I saw recently in the doctor’s surgery who couldn’t have been more than 4 asking her Mummy for her iPhone. I know I didn’t get my first mobile phone until I was 19 and let me tell you, there was nothing overly smart about it and I really only had it for emergencies. I had limited credit, calls were so expensive and there was no such thing as SMS conversations (this is the part where you’d expect the eye rolling to start).
There’s no denying how far technology has come in the short time since I was that age (well shortish anyway).
Not to mention the wonderful world of computers. I smile to myself thinking of my childhood when I used to get excited about playing the Commodore 64 on the weekends and the hours of fun during my teen years that were spent playing games like Carmen San Diego and the various Quests (Kings, Police and Space). It’s strange to think that my son is not going to understand a world where you don’t have constant access to some form of personal computer 24/7. He’s most likely going to laugh when we tell him about our first computer lessons in primary school where, once a week, you’d all file into the computer lab where there were maybe 10 Apple Macs that were to be shared amongst a class of 25-30. A world where word processing was innovation, email didn’t exist and the internet was only used by intelligence agencies is going to seem positively ancient.
So in the spirit of embracing the harsh realities of life (yes, the ageing process will continue despite these miraculous technological advances) I’m enjoying the strolls down memory lane as I start to catalogue the 
golden oldies that I’m going to be able to pull out to tell my son. While I’m in no particular hurry to get there, I do think I’m going to enjoy imparting my little snapshot of history and hopefully, just because I continue to age, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll turn into a technological dinosaur in the process.
We’ll see!
Image courtesy of Microsoft ClipArt & FreeDigitalPhotos.net
MammaDee 