It was a normal staff meeting for 34 year old Meg Carlson until the other office workers, some 30 years her senior, asked her what she did over the weekend. Meg gushed, “Played some old school videogames!” When she had to explain to the older workers what that meant, she said that some of the “old school games” she was playing were The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers series, which were from around the 1980′s and 90′s.
The mood of the room quickly soured.
Patty McDonald screeched, “You realize people older than 1980 aren’t old, don’t you?!”
“Yeah,” said Lamina Stein, “That’s not that old, I have shoes older than that.”
A very confused Meg explained that “old school” is just a name given to videogames that are now several generations old, otherwise known as “retro.” Just because technology becomes old and dated fairly quickly doesn’t mean people do at the same rate. Cell phones from that time, for instance, are incredibly obsolete but that doesn’t have any relation to people’s age or usefulness.
The explanations fell on deaf, grey ears. Meg is scheduled for sensitivity training until 2020, so that when she is done she can call her training “old school.” Afterwards, the older women met at a bar for mint juleps and had coordinated their celebration with something called “land lines.”
* Update *
It has been requested by the old ladies’ lawyers that we are to stop using the offensive term “Old School” and replace it with “Chronologically Challenged School.” Our response could not be accurately contained in text, but could be best demonstrated with sneezes and interpretive dance while in the dark and eating ice cream from a bucket.
I grew up on an Atari 800, which ran on diesel and was released somewhere around the late Cretaceous period. Out old-school THAT, bitches.
Young whippersnapper. When I was a kid we had to kill the dinosaur, turn it to tar, and refine the fuel ourselves.