An acquaintance of mine once told me a funny/sad anecdote about his boomer father. The acquaintance visited his parents, as he was ought to do, and his father was unusually quiet and grumpy. After a while he exploded, demanded to know how my acquaintance fucked up yet again, he always knew he was criminal scum, he never was right as a kid etc. My acquaintance, for the record, is an upstanding family man who has never been on the wrong side of the law and has perfectly normie predilections. Turns out the boomer dad got a scam call from someone pretending to be his son, having a spiel how he is in jail and needs bail money or something, and believed it hook, line and sinker, but just didn't fall for it because he would never spend his money on his kids troubles. But he was perfectly happy to believe his son, who was from all accounts an average student and never been on any sort of trouble in youth or now, somehow got himself arrested. The boomer dad still believes the jail stuff is real, even though his son showed up a couple of days after the call, knowing nothing about jail or anything.
And i was confronted with the ineptitude of my boomer coworkers again recently. In a meeting the old boomer crone presented a scam she fell for - she was browsing the web and somehow got on a website with extremely fake looking popups telling her her pc had a virus. Naturally she clicked every link and installed every program offered she could. She presented this as indistinguishable from genuine notifications about viruses etc, even though they look nothing like the normal ones. the it department had to unfuck her stuff. never mind we are not supposed to do private stuff on work pcs, but with boomers there's either boomer bosses, and everyone else has given up on reprimanding boomers because it doesn't work.
She recently got promoted to a lead position btw mostly because she's a woman. A newbie with nearly no experience also applied to that position, and it apparently took heroic action from hr to get the boomer into the position, because all non hr people with a say would have preferred anyone but her.
Generally the digital ineptitude of my boomer coworkers is baffling. They introduced pcs in this department over 20 years ago, some of the software we work with has been unchanged since then, the boomers have been around for all this time, and they still can't really use it or understand anything about it. Double clicking links and wondering why they open twice, double clicking dropdown menus and cursing how the computer glitches all the time. And don't get me started and the more "advanced" stuff.
We also deal with a lot of confidential information, but that shit is a lost cause. Everyone shits on the young for supposedly being unable to function without ai, but it's the boomers at my work who upload every document and every email to chatgpt with no oversight. corporate didn't catch on to that yet, and the boomer bosses don't really grasp the situation. they also let ai look for the info they need, even though you'd be faster to just look it up yourself in our internal wiki or some handbook, like they've been doing for decades. now they ask the ai, and if they're smart, double check for hallucinations by looking into the reference docs they should have looked at in the first place.
there was also a weird discussion among the boomers how it's problematic when they print out confidential documents and take them in the field, someone outside might read them. for them this is a problem with an external locus of control, someone else have to do something. i don't understand. we are not supposed to print confidential documents. we are not supposed to leave the office with them. we are not supposed to leave our shit unattended. there is not even a need to bring them - you can just remember what's in them. or you could black out the confidential shit, or make some notes of the details you need during field work (it's not much) or whatever. they are too stupid for the job, make idiotic choices but it's somehow someone else's fault.
