The generation gap has always been a thing in the workplace, but nowadays, it often feels more pronounced than ever.
We constantly hear about older generations judging younger workers as entitled and incompetent, but stories like the one a young professional recently told on X pull things into much sharper focus — and turn the tables on all those cranky office boomers in the process.
A worker’s boomer boss claimed that certain emojis ‘cost the company extra’ to use.
At this point, we’re in what feels like year 497 of the situation that has been the subject of myriad jokes about working with Boomers and older people in the office — that they’re so out of touch with modernity they need a young person’s help any time they want to, say, open a PDF.
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That was the plight of basically the entire millennial generation throughout the 2000s, after all — basically getting paid to save their bosses from learning how to use the printer or figure out how to make a pivot table in Excel. And then having to act as their parents’ personal IT department whenever they’d visit home, on top of it.
But surely in 2024, things have changed, right? It’s the age of AI, and computers are literally sentient now! Surely the olds have caught up, yes? NO, at least if X user @colleen_eileen’s experience is any indication.
She wrote in an X post that she was recently reprimanded at work for something utterly absurd. Her “bossy Boomer supervisor,” or “BBS” as she calls her, pulled her into her office to take issue with her use of emojis — specifically, the more costly “celebratory” ones.
What on Earth does that mean? Well, her boss claimed that the company is billed extra if anyone uses an emoji other than a heart or a thumbs-up. Literally — she told Colleen, “‘We may only use thumb or heart otherwise the company is charged extra.'”
Her boomer boss seems to frequently make up reasons to avoid modern ways of doing things.
If you’re staring slack-jawed at your phone right now, imagine how @colleen_eileen feels. “I am going to walk into the sea,” she wrote in hilarious gallows-humor frustration at being told by her Boomer boss that “celebratory” emojis are a decadent luxury.
That is, of course, not how literally anything works. It’s not like you have to sign up for an emoji plan whenever you subscribe to a tech product!
We are not in the dark days of 2002, when we all had to opt into TEXTING on our Motorola StarTacs and then figure out which organs to sell when all those T9 texts ran up our million-dollar Cingular Wireless bills (there’s a Bush-era reference for you). We are literally living in a time when experts are warning that computers might do an uprising!
But you’d never know it based on @colleen_eileen’s boss. She also previously reprimanded Colleen for using keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste instead of using the 87-times-longer process of clicking on them from a drop-down menu.
“Instead of saying, oh neat, what a time saver, she told me it was against company policy,” Colleen wrote in another tweet. Which, like, no, it’s not, Karen! You are simply making things up! This is not an improv class. Quit it!
These absurd incidents shed light on how generation gaps are affecting the workplace.
It’s honestly hard to decide which of these encounters is more ridiculous, but both are unquestionably revealing about all too many young people’s experiences with boomers — not just their seemingly constitutional discomfort with anything they don’t understand but their often farcical obstinance about it.
Colleen’s experience underlines this perfectly, especially the fact that while her boss clearly has a problem with certain emojis, she apparently LOVES a GIF! The notion that an emoji of a guy blowing a party horn is somehow so decadent it will tank the company’s financials, but an embeddable ANIMATION is free of charge to be used at will is farcical. This is like an SNL sketch!
It casts a different light on all the workplace conflicts we hear so much about these days. For instance, a London School of Economics study on the workplace generation gap found that Gen Z and Millennials reported being far less productive than Baby Boomers and Gen X. Which would seem to validate a ton of stereotypes about younger workers, right?
But LSE’s study found that this lack of productivity was directly correlated with the age gap between workers and managers — those whose manager was 12 or more years older than them were 1.5 times more likely to report low productivity (and three times more likely to be dissatisfied at their jobs). They cited the difficulty of getting their managers to listen to them as being key to this productivity gap.
Can you even think of a better example of Boomer obstinance than being scolded for such pointless — and entirely made up — “problems” like emoji use and keyboard shortcuts?! It all seems indicative of a common problem with Boomers — the reflexive assumption that younger people couldn’t possibly know anything of value and that their ways of doing things are inherently flawed.
However, when you have to resort to absurd fabrications about emojis to preserve your position of authority? Well, let’s just say, “OK, boomer” became a dismissive catchphrase a few years ago for a reason, and leave it at that.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
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