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I have used most of the options and am Gen X. I worked at one office that required you to pay to join a coffee club- either the regular or premium- and I just brought in a french press for that and made my own. My next office had a regular coffee maker that caused problems because someone kept throwing the grounds down the sink and flooded the mail room. As a mostly Boomer office, we elected to get a Keurig and that did well for us until I left around 4 years later. My current office is mostly Gen X with a smattering of Boomer and Millennial. They have an ultra cheap coffee club, which one Millennial found unacceptable and brought in his own Keurig. I use neither and typically bring in canned cold brew. They are expensive but since I go into the office only two days a week and try to get them on sale, it is still cheaper than a $4 starbucks.
I find it fascinating, that coffeemakers in offices are taken for granted. No office I've ever worked in had one, and you weren't supposed to bring food or drink into the office or your cubicle. No noshing on company time or state time. Those offices haven't changed. But now there are places of employment, where people fight over what coffee machine to use?
How were you raised differently from your husband, that was due to a 5-year difference in age, vs. different parenting styles resulting from regional cultural differences, or class difference, or generational differences of the two sets of parents involved, or differences in parental psychology, or other factors, like birth order of the child?
How could a 5-year difference in age cohort (Boomer vs. borderline Gen-X-er) make a significant difference in upbringing, and what do you feel allows you to pinpoint the difference in your age cohorts as the cause?
There are certain things that can make such a difference in a very short of time.
An example is the explosion of television in the early 60s as a "babysitter." Another is the explosion of the Web in the early 2000s, again as a babysitter.
The integration phase in the 60s was also a great divider. Children born in the first half of the Boomer birth period would have gone completely through school in a fully segregated society (including segregated television).
I was born in the middle of the Boomer birth era, and I had never been within 20 feet of a white kid until I was in middle school. Television got integrated very quickly after 1964, and that would have made a big difference in the developing mindset of the children watching it.
I find it fascinating, that coffeemakers in offices are taken for granted. No office I've ever worked in had one, and you weren't supposed to bring food or drink into the office or your cubicle. No noshing on company time or state time. Those offices haven't changed. But now there are places of employment, where people fight over what coffee machine to use? The things people take for granted...
Back then there was just the water cooler in the hall.
I find it fascinating, that coffeemakers in offices are taken for granted. No office I've ever worked in had one, and you weren't supposed to bring food or drink into the office or your cubicle. No noshing on company time or state time. AFAIK, those offices haven't changed. But now there are places of employment, where people fight over what coffee machine to use? The things people take for granted...
Wow, that would never have worked in our office. What would you do if you had to work through lunch, which was often required in my job? I worked in the public sector, but I wouldn't call it being "their" time. I had to eat or I got cranky and if the workload is preventing me from taking an actual lunch hour, it's going to be at my desk.
And most people also ate breakfast at their desks, since everyone commuted. When it takes an hour or two to get to work, you tend to get up early, get out of the house to catch your trains or buses, and then you are hungry by the time you get to your desk at 8 or 8:30. Lots of places in the area sold hot breakfasts or had a pay-by-the-ounce breakfast buffet, or you just grabbed something from one of the street coffee carts.
I'd get up at 5 a.m. sometimes, see a text from my boss that came in at 1:30 a.m. saying she needed me to have X on her desk at 8:30. There was no time to eat breakfast before getting on a 6:10 train.
We did have a "pantry" where there was a coffee maker or two for people who were part of "coffee clubs" that contributed, a microwave, and a refrigerator for people who brought in lunches from home to save money, which I did off and on. I don't recall anyone arguing over the type of coffee machine, though.
Wow, that would never have worked in our office. What would you do if you had to work through lunch, which was often required in my job? I worked in the public sector, but I wouldn't call it being "their" time. I had to eat or I got cranky and if the workload is preventing me from taking an actual lunch hour, it's going to be at my desk.
And most people also ate breakfast at their desks, since everyone commuted. When it takes an hour or two to get to work, you tend to get up early, get out of the house to catch your trains or buses, and then you are hungry by the time you get to your desk at 8 or 8:30. Lots of places in the area sold hot breakfasts or had a pay-by-the-ounce breakfast buffet, or you just grabbed something from one of the street coffee carts.
I'd get up at 5 a.m. sometimes, see a text from my boss that came in at 1:30 a.m. saying she needed me to have X on her desk at 8:30. There was no time to eat breakfast before getting on a 6:10 train.
We did have a "pantry" where there was a coffee maker or two for people who were part of "coffee clubs" that contributed, a microwave, and a refrigerator for people who brought in lunches from home to save money, which I did off and on. I don't recall anyone arguing over the type of coffee machine, though.
There are certain things that can make such a difference in a very short of time.
An example is the explosion of television in the early 60s as a "babysitter." Another is the explosion of the Web in the early 2000s, again as a babysitter.
The integration phase in the 60s was also a great divider. Children born in the first half of the Boomer birth period would have gone completely through school in a fully segregated society (including segregated television). I was born in the middle of the Boomer birth era, and I had never been within 20 feet of a white kid until I was in middle school.
Ah. Good examples. I looked up the Boomer sub-cohorts to get more examples:
Quote:
Life at home was more different for Gen Jones than the more traditional setting that Early Boomers experienced. More homes were being forced into having two working parents due to changes in the economy and job availability. When Gen Jones went to school, there were not enough desks or books in the classroom because the school system wasn’t ready for this large cohort. They weren’t ready to put their kids in the same situation, so families were beginning to shrink in size. The pill became available so birth control and family planning were easier than in the past. With the competitive job market and economic stresses, divorce was on the rise as Gen Jones entered their formative years, causing teens to spend more time working independently and caring for themselves. While this wasn’t the generation of latch-key kids, Generation Jones was on the trailing edge of Generation X, which saw a dramatic spike in divorce rate and latch-key kids.
There are certain things that can make such a difference in a very short of time.
An example is the explosion of television in the early 60s as a "babysitter." Another is the explosion of the Web in the early 2000s, again as a babysitter.
The integration phase in the 60s was also a great divider. Children born in the first half of the Boomer birth period would have gone completely through school in a fully segregated society (including segregated television).
I was born in the middle of the Boomer birth era, and I had never been within 20 feet of a white kid until I was in middle school. Television got integrated very quickly after 1964, and that would have made a big difference in the developing mindset of the children watching it.
My brother-in-law (black) grew up in a mixed-race but mostly segregated town in NJ in the 1950s. Because of the way the district lines were drawn, he went to the mostly-white school. The next year they redrew the lines, and his brother a year younger went to the mostly-black school, but he was allowed to continue in his own school.
The difference in their lives was amazing. He was a successful businessman with a career in hospital administration. His brother was a drug addict who went to prison for robbery and died of AIDs a couple of months after his release. Maybe the schooling alone wasn't the major factor, but I'm sure it was an influence. Back then the "white" schools had different budgets than the "black" schools. Also, one of the reasons he got his first job in hospital administration was through a white schoolmate who was in a hiring capacity at the nearby hospital. The friend told him to apply because it was the late 1960s and they were looking for black people to fill office positions to meet Affirmative Action standards. He took advantage and worked it to get a foot in the door, but having that insider network from his school years surely helped.
Re TV, a few years ago my sister told me that her husband, now disabled with MS, loved watching Leave It To Beaver reruns. She thought it hilarious that a 1950s black kid was so fascinated with this portrayal of life of a 1950s/60s white family which to us was completely unrealistic.
(Now BIL has moved on and shares my addiction to true crime shows, much to my sister's consternation.)
Wow, that would never have worked in our office. What would you do if you had to work through lunch, which was often required in my job? I worked in the public sector, but I wouldn't call it being "their" time. I had to eat or I got cranky and if the workload is preventing me from taking an actual lunch hour, it's going to be at my desk.
And most people also ate breakfast at their desks, since everyone commuted. When it takes an hour or two to get to work, you tend to get up early, get out of the house to catch your trains or buses, and then you are hungry by the time you get to your desk at 8 or 8:30. Lots of places in the area sold hot breakfasts or had a pay-by-the-ounce breakfast buffet, or you just grabbed something from one of the street coffee carts.
I'd get up at 5 a.m. sometimes, see a text from my boss that came in at 1:30 a.m. saying she needed me to have X on her desk at 8:30. There was no time to eat breakfast before getting on a 6:10 train.
We did have a "pantry" where there was a coffee maker or two for people who were part of "coffee clubs" that contributed, a microwave, and a refrigerator for people who brought in lunches from home to save money, which I did off and on. I don't recall anyone arguing over the type of coffee machine, though.
It's nice to be retired.
Some offices closed for lunch. I remember going through a phase of picking up a simple breakfast at a campus cafeteria (it was a university job), and bringing it to the office in the morning to munch on while I worked. I remember discovering later, that I'd been written up on those occasions, though there was no stated office policy nor had anything been mentioned to me directly; I found a bunch of notes in my personnel file. Surprise!
I find it fascinating, that coffeemakers in offices are taken for granted. No office I've ever worked in had one, and you weren't supposed to bring food or drink into the office or your cubicle. No noshing on company time or state time. Those offices haven't changed. But now there are places of employment, where people fight over what coffee machine to use?
Everywhere I’ve worked (I finished college in the late ‘90s) has offered a kitchen or some sort of break room where people could eat, even in the places where we weren’t supposed to have food in the cubicles. I’ve never worked in a place where we weren’t given time for paid breaks and an unpaid lunch, and in some cases there just wasn’t enough time to leave the building for lunch. I worked in one place that was far enough away from everywhere that even going to the grocery store took more than 30 minutes. At my last job, I’d often have things scheduled at 10am that wouldn’t finish until after lunch, so I would need to at least have some sort of snack or food to have during a short break. I would do this when I visited other offices as well and just bring a sandwich or something for lunch.
Personally, I don't count children born after 1959 as Boomers. For one thing, the actual boom in birth rates started abruptly with the end of WWII and ended very abruptly in 1959.
Second, those born after 1959 missed most of the worldview-shaping events that are common to those born in the 40s and 50s, such as spending formative years in a completely segregated nation, and doing duck-and-cover, and being affected (even if they didn't know why) by the announcement of Kennedy's assassination.
Just like War Genners can recall exactly where they were when they heard about the Pearl Harbor attack, "real" Boomers can remember exactly where they were when they heard about the assassination of John Kennedy.
It's not so much arbitrary dates that mark generations as it is the pivotal events.
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