Employee Who Remembers Where They Were When Kennedy Assassinated Somehow Not Connecting With Coworker Born After 9/11
By: Max Stolte
DANVILLE, IL—This week at the the local Family Dollar, recent hire Hayleigh Patterson found that she “couldn’t even” with longtime employee Martha Farley. Hayleigh, being a recent high school graduate born in a post-9/11 America, was unable to connect on any level with her senior employee who remembers where she was when President John F. Kennedy’s head was eviscerated on film.
“She’s all talking about smoking cigarettes on planes and taking bottles over 3 ounces in her carry on, like girl, what are you even saying right now?” Patterson lamented to reporters at the cash register. “She’s never even heard of 100 gecs or Minecraft, like what am I supposed to talk about with this fuggo old bitch?”
The awkward silences during shifts are met with regular attempts to break them by Martha. “I’ll say something about a Kevin Costner film and she has no idea who that is. I offer to lend her a DVD and she doesn’t know what that is or how to even play one. We sell them in aisle 7! She thought they were just weird skinny books,” a flabbergasted Martha huffed.
The generational gap may be too far to bridge in this all too common scenario. Whether it’s Hayleigh filming TikTok dances while the cashier line grows out of control or Martha referencing a president before Obama, one is always leaving the other as confused as humanly possible. “She doesn’t know about Bush or bush. Says girls ain’t supposed to have hair down there and it ain’t the 70s anymore grandma,” Martha said between cigarette drags.
“She tried tellin’ me the CIA or the mob killed the president. Ummmm pretty sure we would have heard about that in history class Martha. If assassinating the president was so easy, why the fuck don’t anybody do it now?” Hayleigh said without ever looking up from her phone. She was later investigate by federal agents because she was going live on Instagram when she said that.
Martha, breaking down in tears, described a typical lunch break. “We can’t even order lunch from the same place because she has allergies or thinks the place has racist vibes. She saw a Mexican man working in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and tried to get it shut down.”
It’s clear there is no simple fix for the technology age’s exponentially increasing differences amongst generations. The best we can hope is that whatever comes after Gen Z is infinitely more obnoxious and cause them to gain wisdom with grace. Unfortunately if this ever happens, everyone they may wish to apologize to will be dead.
