Recently I was at a business meeting.

It was getting a little long in the tooth on the second day and I was having trouble concentrating, (sorry Benny) when a title flashed onto the screen that woke me up.

Boomers to Zoomers.

Honestly, I didn’t really know where this title was going, but it looked interesting.

Listening for a bit, though, made things come clear.

The question behind the title was, how do the baby boomers relate to gen x, or, the millennials in the work place.

I thought, “Ah ha! I’m going to finally see how this is supposed to be; I’ll be able to take this knowledge home with me and get those guys to harmonize better with how the business should run.

But what I brought home with me was decidedly different than what I expected to.

It became apparent early on in the discourse that it’s not so much about the old fogeys (like me) and our way of looking at things that is important.

Sure, our way of looking at things is important in the general puzzle of life.

But the piece we bring to the puzzle isn’t so big or noticeable as I thought.

The general idea at the meeting was that we needed to come to terms with those from the generations not like our own by understanding what the influences were that they grew up in.

For instance, if you grew up with a phone in your hand, (whether to excess or not, that’s for you to decide) you would be much more apt to use it and believe (mostly) in what it tells you rather than going about it some other way.

Or, we of the old fogey generation may say that we can’t get used to reading a book on our device, that we like the feel and smell of a book in our hands.

That’s true enough.

For us anyway.

So, as I delve into this way of thinking more, I come up with this.

One in my family, namely, one of the sweet daughters, uses this phrase a fair bit in her speech–Would you ever.

Like, Would you ever fill my car up with gas?

Or, Would you ever be okay if we skipped the family supper plans tonight since we have other plans that came up?

Another of the sweet daughters has taken to saying–I feel like.

Like, I feel like this gravy could use more salt.

Or, I feel like that guy just cut us off.

For a while, I made the tiniest bit of fun about the ‘would you ever’ preface to each sentence.

And I was (maybe) getting ready to make a little fun of the ‘I feel like’ prologue, but I was cut short when I heard a sixty something lady seated behind me at the coffee shop say ‘I feel like.’

But unfortunately for her, the rest of her coffee group were talking animatedly enough that they missed picking up on the fact that she wanted to contribute to the conversation.

Or, was it that she was speaking in a somewhat foreign tongue to their generation anyway, and therefore their ear didn’t pick up on it as quickly as it might have otherwise.

When I heard, ‘I feel like he needs,’ followed by ‘I feel like he needs,’ by still more ‘I feel like he needs,’ at last her group paid heed to her and I heard, ‘I feel like’ it will be that person missed out on some structure early in life.

And then the thing crystallized in my mind.

It sounded really off for her to say, ‘I feel like.’

I wanted to turn around and say, “Speak your generation’s language and then we’ll all pick up on it.”

It seems to me that when one generation tries to cross over and become another generation, confusion is much more likely to occur, and that confusion might be mostly in the one who is trying to cross over, because they have such a hard time getting their point across since nobody else is ‘feeling the conversation’ like the generation that coined the phrase does.

I realize this has its limits and we need to be flexible enough to change into the good points that another generation may teach us.

But for goodness sake, let’s each bring our own generational puzzle piece to the table, otherwise the puzzle will be a lopsided affair that never gets finished.