Baby Boomer vs. Gen-Y’rs
Born at the tail end of the baby boomer epoch, I had the good fortune early in my career to stumble into an industry that jumped onto the crowded coattails of early microprocessor technology. On a recreational level, I voluntarily immersed myself in the fledgling world of PC’s long before they were fashionable.
My earliest sip of computing was in a high school computer math class in the mid-70′s. We each used teletype terminals the size of a vending machines. 
They were timeshared to an offsite mainframe via acoustic data couplers (the original “modem”, which was a cradle into which a standard telephone handset was placed). We learned to write programs that performed repetitive mathematical tasks, saving our work on really long strips of paper punch-tape that we’d roll-up at the end of class for safe keeping. I won’t bore you with each evolutionary step I took during my subsequent journey to present day personal computers, but I have especially fond memories of picking up a brand new Texas Instruments TI-99/2 back in November of 1982. I’ll describe the experience in my next post, “Adventure on Black Friday”.
My early involvement in computing gave me a substantial advantage over my contemporaries as personal computers began to infiltrate our professional and personal lives. You see, at a time when most people were learning how to turn on their new PC and make it print “hello world”, I knew and actually understood the fundamentals of DOS. For any reader who may not know what DOS is, consider it the horse and buggy of Windows Vista. And let’s face it, what modern motorist doesn’t wish they knew the subtleties of handling a horse’s reins, or how to fix a broken wagon wheel?
Don Tapscott, author of a dozen or more books on business transformation strategies, couldn’t be more wrong, when he puts forth in his book Growing up Digital, that baby boomers have been eclipsed by their offspring. Although he’s right that digital technology is no more intimidating to them than a toaster, this boomer believes that the ‘Net-Gen’, as Tapscott has dubbed them, can only function if there is someone around to provide and insert the bread for them!
Necessary for a degree that I am pursuing, I’m now taking a college course in business computer applications, or so it’s called. In truth, it’s a class for using Microsoft’s Excel. A nonconformist of sorts, I chose not to jump onto the Microsoft Office bandwagon, and instead use WordPerfect’s suite. I learned to use WordPerfect when it was the gold standard of word processing, and became fluent with a great many of its features. Since Novell first packaged WordPerfect into a suite, the companion spreadsheet has been QuattroPro. It was developed by Borland as a lower cost alternative to the dominant Lotus 1-2-3, and later acquired by Novell. The appeal of these applications over Word and Excel is that much more control is in the hands of the user. That can, however, be frustrating for many users who aren’t prepared invest time in learning the necessary skills.
The greatest challenge with the assignments, for me, is learning Excel’s menu structure and functional idiosyncracies. 
It is no doubt wise to become familiar with the spreadsheet that is used overwhelmingly in the business world today. So twice a week, alongside late teen and early 20-year old Y-Generation business majors, I am learning Excel. These young people, born and raised in a digital society, are so savvy that they are logged into their workstations before their Diesel’s even hit the chair. They are all busy catching a few minutes of personal internet time while waiting for class to begin. From my vantage point at the back corner workstation, I can see computer screens throughout the classroom purring through web pages from MySpace to Fantasy Football. It’s truly breathtaking… until class begins. That is when this boomer gets some real traction, and with methodical discipline, pulls several laps ahead of those Y-Geners! Plus, since I have legitimate keyboarding skills (called “typing” when I learned it) I have an even greater advantage over many of them.
The awkwardness many of my fellow students display, as they bludgeon their way through excel’s basic functions, is tantamount to walking barefoot through broken sea shells. Very slow, and noticeably painful. The step-by-step instructions in the lab manual provided to us, along with briefings given by the Professor, 
paint as accurate a roadmap as you could want, yet the future of America approaches the task as a mouse would a maze. Though they appear to make their facebook pages dance, they can hardly be considered ballerinas of the digital stage. It’s as if they’re begging, “Will someone p-l-e-a-s-e put bread in my toaster so I can click on the ‘next’ button and get this thing done.”
Should somebody tell them that they are unlikely to find a classified ad that reads: “HELP WANTED – Corporate Administrator proficient at raking through YouTube in order to uncover pointless videos.”