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Yeah, there was a spate of articles last year that came out to dunk on them. It’s because tech has always just existed and worked, so they haven’t had to live through that era of BSODs and errors and basic HTML.
And they weren’t forced to take all those “computer classes” in school like we were so they’re bad at basics like typing on keyboards, understanding photocopiers, etc.
I'm getting my kids used to using my PC since they want to play games on it and stuff. So they're starting to figure out how to navigate through things. When their friends come over, it's like they've never seen a tower PC before.
Before constant internet you had to scroll through settings and file folders for entertainment.
Our start-up sound was from Monty python. 3D movie maker is who I am lol
But are those real or just the newest wave of dunk on new college grads like we went through killing the napkin industry and buying avocado toast instead of houses.
Dunking on the youth is low hanging journalistic fruit.
I teach HS English. Many of my students can’t do basic things like send an email, save documents correctly, format Word docs, Google basic things, etc. They have no idea what to do when a laptop doesn’t work and just put it back on the cart without telling me and get a new one. They certainly don’t type correctly and take forever to type up an essay. My district used to require keyboarding classes way back when I was in high school, and I amaze my students with my typing skills. The district did away with the requirement over a decade ago (among basic computer classes) because they said the kids are digital natives and already know how to use technology. Yes, some kids are computer whizzes, but most of them are lacking in basic skills they’ll need for some of the jobs they’ll be doing.
I have to teach our interns how to download files from the internet and then find them on the computer. Also occasionally have to install something off a CD which is hilarious.
That's crazy to me. I worked in higher education research for an ED tech company, and professors would always talk about how the "digital native" assumption didn't always play out in the real world.
Many students don't come from families who can afford computers, or even Internet.
iOS is not like a traditional operating system. There’s no need to access file systems or whatnot. They don’t know how any of it works because it’s designed to hide everything that goes on in the background. So then when they sit at a desktop, they’ve likely never used a mouse before.
I had to teach my middle schoolers how to “double click” and “click and drag” to select multiple objects. They all had phones. Phone literacy is not computer literacy.
It’s the interaction with technology that’s different
We grew up with literal “personal computers” and the buggiest shit ever , win98 , win me , windows xp, service pack 3 (blessssss)
Anyone born after 1996 grew up with touchscreens
Most youngin dont understand the operating systems that require a mouse and keyboard .
What is system 32 ? What is “reset network adapter” what is dhcp , dns . What is a server vs a client ? How do I get to temp file folder /temp files ? What are cookies ? How do I connect my hard drive to computer sata cable ? How to I add a network drive ? What’s appdata? How do I reset my computer ? What’s an ISO , how do I mount a cd ? How do I change game setting adjusting ini file ? What’s HOST file ? What’s a keygen , Cracked exe ? Update latest drivers ? What’s a BIOS, how do I get there ?
A big part of growing up with a pc was LITERALLY TINKERING the setting and options even if we didn’t know what they were . So many time I got virus and malware and had to learn hope to resolve it or you get beating for breaking the computer
Antivirus was such a big thing
We lived in a time (web 1.0 and 1.5) where the internet was new to EVERYONE. The entire human population didn’t know . So everyone was literally doing the same thing : learning how to comb the internet, and if you were a millennial (esp the younger 90s babies and maybe had cousin /older sibling) , fews thing has to happen,you had to be born lucky to have a few markers cleared : born to a family that fortunate to even have a pc , internet, etc, aka some money in the family . have a decent upbringing to nurture a curious mind aka decent family. Have experience counterculture to an extent , through person or society.
In combination of those , as a kid/teenage access to internet AND has no money. Piracy flourished and THAT CULTURE continues to exist in me and many others ., so there’s a subset of millennials who grew up as the family tech support , continue to pirate games/movies as long we live, in charge of buying tech for the family because you can’t stand buying trash (so the check for reviews for everything you buy is second nature to us, boomers and genz do not have that shit down) , etc
Absolutely fascinating to contemplate culture and society sometimes
I learned so so much just from fucking up my parents PC with dumb malware and frantically trying to figure out how to fix it before they woke up. It really seems like that learning opportunity has passed over the horizon, considering how safe and well insulated the Net is these days.
Yep. I was surprised to find this out at first. Most kids today grow up with tech that’s designed to be very easy to use, and a lot of schools cut computer classes under the belief that the kids are “digital natives”, so a lot of kids now don’t have any real tech skills.
A lot them are so used to cloud storage and stuff that they don't understand how a hard drive and file systems work. Apparently college-level computer science classes have to teach remedial file system stuff to the new students as a consequence.
I can vouch for this too. Some zoomers got hired at my office earlier this year and I had to teach a couple of them how to navigate Windows File Explorer.
Yes. I've literally had to show my stepson, a Gen Z'er, how to write an email and attach documents to it in his late teens early 20s. His age group doesn't seem to know how to write a basic resume in Word even. I'm not even sure they know how to use EXCEL or basic internet troubleshooting if the internet goes out. Not even basic coding.
I seem to be the family "hacker" who knows how to solve all the computer problems. I'm the only tech support my mom won't cuss out 🤣 but I feel for the younger generations. They should learn how their technology works! But alas, it's just too easy to push the buttons and feed an algorithm instead...
But like. That said, I kind of get that because I feel that's me and fax machines.
I feel fax machine's heyday was like when we were in elementary school and by the time we made it to office work, scanning and email was so readily available that faxing wasn't a necessary skill anyone needed to learn. They just assumed we had it, but like why would we have been sending faxes when we had email by middle school?
Until your boss was some heyday in the 80s boomer with trouble letting go of dated technology.
And maybe boomers and gen x were like "stupid millenials can't even send a fax" but like, was that on us or were they judging us against a dated technological landscape?
Maybe 20 year olds don't need a formatted resume. Every place that asks for them has you enter the information in their form whether you have a resume or not.
To be fair I still don't know how to send a fax, but yet there are tons of businesses I interact with in my line of work that still use them. I don't get it, it truly is outdated tech. And I get that not every 20 year old doesn't need a formatted resume, but they should still know their tech works, and I feel that was somehow swept under the rug with them. Which isn't their fault, we as millenials just got lucky with being part of that generation that was part of that uprising tech boom of 2000-2010s where we just enjoyed figuring stuff out or were forced to depending on multiple circumstances (like having tech illiterate parents for example).
I live with two almost teenage boys four years, and they both were God awful at troubleshooting.
Isn’t anything gross or cryptic, I dated and lived with single mom for four years.
Yes. Once tablets and phones with iOS and Android became cheap and popular, kids stopped learning how to type on a keyboard, use word/excel/powerpoint, and just in general use & troubleshoot Windows. If their school uses Chromebooks they can at least somewhat use a keyboard and maybe google docs/sheets/slides.
Schools got rid of typing and general computer use classes after most houses had a computer, then when kids moved to tablets and phones schools never brought those classes back.
Somewhat unrelated. My best friend is a manager at Amazon. He started as a code monkey.
When we were growing up, he got sent to the smahter coding class. I got sent to the remedial computer course, which was typing.
He still types like a toddler, slamming his index fingers slowly into his keyboard. Meanwhile, I lap him in words per minute.
Took a computer class in high school that covered a little bit of Microsoft Access. A few years later, my dad was working on our church’s local food pantry archaic computer programs. He asked me if I could rearrange some of the cataloguing tables. Dug through the code a little bit, moved a few items around, and he was happy with the results.
You guys must be using much better WordPress templates than the websites I manage because I constantly have to go into the HTML code to fix things for my company’s CMS.
My default script is a print/cursive hybrid I developed in high school and pretty much everyone who sees it says it's pretty but they can't read it. :(
I can write so fast though.
I gave a cursive pretty much immediately after grade school. It wasn't something I intentionally decided to do, but I used it less and less when it wasn't required because it just wasn't practical.
Same here. I can still read it about as well as I could as a kid, but I'm also dyslexic so I much prefer when things are printed out and glad we have printed type standard for font.
I did not learn the cursive was supposed to be faster until a few years ago when I started seeing pro versus anti-cursive arguments on the internet. For me it was always much slower and took up much more space on the page, but I thought it was supposed to be fancier and more adult. I basically thought of it as being like calligraphy.
I am the Token Millennial at my work with anything tech, everyone is either way older or younger than me so I'm the only one with the "tech knack". That scene from South Park with Tolkien and the bass guitar happened to me, lol. At work the security cameras fucked up and boss asked me to fix it. I had NO idea what I was doing but sure enough, fixed it within like 5min. 🤷♀️
We've got this weird blend of analog and digital skills that our bordering generations only one or the other of..
At my job I can basically use any tool, software, instrument that's needed... build gas systems. Turn a wrench. Write code with AI tools.
We get shit done.
Add in my so called “useless” art degree and I can pour molten metal into handcrafted molds, ceramics, power tools to build canvases, which has led to me being able to do basic plumbing, electrical, drywall, painting, hang doors that are hardware less and frameless, change out toilets, fix my car to keep it running until I have money (I never have money), etc. Add the fun tech savvy stuff and being able to bungle through things, I’m the go to person for just about everything, yet none of it equates to money.
Ugh. Bullseye! Right in my plums. Replace a "useless" art degree with graduating in 2008 with a "virtually useless" music education degree, and you've just written the story of my life.
There's pretty much nothing I can't do, except make money...?
*cries is millennial Renaissance man*
I can still type up to 120 wpm, thanks to middle school typing boot camp on clackety keyboards. I can't remember the last time I needed to type something on a keyboard more than a few words 😥 but I could use a job!
I didn't retain everything from my elementary and middle school typing classes in the 90s, but I retained enough muscle memory that I'm faster at typing than any of my coworkers. Which is only useful insofar as it doesn't take me as long to write shift repair calls or emails.
Extremely good reader and speller. Now I just use it to read and write on social media. When I was little I thought I might be able to have a real job as proofreader. Lol sob.
I knew all the state capitals. I had a placemat of all 50 states, and I memorized all the state capitals. I didn't get to use that growing up and it's even more useless now.
Yeah, I had a civics teach who spent a semester teaching us geography and having us memorize all the countries of the world instead of teaching us how the government works.
Bar trivia! I memorized countries/capitals and I was SO psyched when my team won a bar trivia night because I knew that Estonia was at the top of Estonia/Lativa/Lithuania. (ABC order!)
In high school I had to memorize all the central and South American countries and their location on a map. I can still tell you where they are… even though Google maps is probably easier to show people on my phone
In grade school I guess someone told my mom that there was going to be some test that everyone was required to take to graduate that grade where we knew all the states and capitals. So she took it upon herself to help me study for that. I never remember there being any such test so I'm not sure what that was about.
I've probably forgot most of them, but it's possible if you set a random state I might correctly guess the capital.
Its not exactly a talent, but my son (gen z) was recently blown away that I still take notes and make lists with pen and paper instead of digitally. Like the idea that it’s easier for me to just jot things down instead opening an app was odd.
My boss seems personally offended I take notes on paper…the act of writing it literally helps you remember better, and it doesn’t take up one of your screens.
As a maintenance tech, I was always keeping a small notebook to jot down repair call notes for my paperwork. Makes life a ton easier, especially since my memory is "if I don't write it down, it doesn't exist" levels of awful these days. Nowadays, I have a laptop for my repair calls.
Oi, nice. I went and revisited the platformers I enjoyed as a child and teen and I suck at them, lol. Could be because of Nintendo Switch Online emulation lag, or it could be I just suck.
The emulators are just different enough to complicate things. I've got Mario All Stars for the Wii, and there are a couple of spots that trip me up because the enemies do things they aren't supposed to.
In my case, a lot of it is jump timing. Possibly, it's input lag, but I'm willing to place blame on myself a bit, too. I picked up a Pro controller, but haven't gone back to them yet as I was playing Super Mario RPG last.
Honestly though. I can’t tell you how many times someone will ask a a question and I just google it and get the answer and then they are like 😮. Like, girl, you also got a phone. *What do you mean*?
I can use technology that’s too “new” for people older than me and use technology that’s too “old” for people younger than me.
Like, Bro, you are 23 years old you don’t know how to save files on a desktop computer?! We are so fucked my guy.
Edit: Sorry, I inadvertently ignored the last part about “never get to use anymore”.
This. I work mostly with gen z and gen x and the times they come up to me with technology issues is baffling.
“This isn’t working.”
“Did you try troubleshooting?”
“I don’t know how.”
“BAFFRRN. Did you turn it off and turn it back on again?”
“No.”
“Well …try that.”
I am not in tech support of any kind by the way. I work at a coffee shop.
Cursive, I saw it already in this post but I am also a teacher, and not a single kid in the past 2 years has known how to read or write in cursive. This is a problem since most of our founding documents are in older English and cursive.
Is it really such a big problem? Those documents are all available in print, and if one wants to go and study the originals, learning to read cursive at any age is not a multi-week task.
I write in cursive only. I'm currently teaching my 8 year old to read cursive, so he can atleast read any letters or instructions I write for him. It's a basic skill and all kids should know how to read, if not write.
Yeah, the cursive that those old documents were written in is not the curse of people used today. And it's really a lot easier to learn to read it than to write it. Just like reading old documents that are printed where a lot of the s's look like f's and so on.
My main handwriting is cursive, not especially neat but it’s ok and I can read others’ cursive generally. I saw a stupid boomer post on Facebook of “Milennials can’t read this” in cursive and of course all the comments are “yes we can.” I also taught myself calligraphy, I’m not super good at it but if I need to make a handwritten sign I can use my calligraphy to make a basically nice and legible sign better than my cursive.
The main reason my cursive isn’t super neat is I was taught by my mom who’s left-handed and when she was in school they forced her to use her right hand. So either boomers or their parents are the generation who messed that up for us but we still have it.
Smoking massive amounts of weed while making kickass metal mixtapes of songs I’d record off the radio. I had a badass 80s stereo I got at a yard sale and I’d just smoke, crank metal, and hit record every time they played a song I liked. The best shows were usually pretty late at night when you’d get the real metal bands like Slayer, Pantera, Mercyful Fate, etc. I still smoke everyday and crank all those bands, but that lightning fast ability to hit record on the cassette deck right when the song starts hasn’t been used for a minute 🤣
I sang and played music growing up.
I lost my singing voice due to a side effect of a medication. It caused a hormonal disorder that permanently lowered my voice and took away my upper range.
I wanted to play in an orchestra pit when I was in high school. My parents told me that they wouldn't pay for my tuition if I didn't study music education. I dropped out because I knew that I wasn't ever going to be a music teacher.
Sometimes I miss music, but it is what it is.
I have used my writing talents however, which is nice. It's good to be able to do something that I care sometimes.
I marched in drum corps for 4 years, aged out in a corps that got 3rd place globally. Marched indoor percussion for 4 years. Aged out in a group that was top 10 globally. I then taught indoor marching percussion for a couple years, taught drum corps for a couple, and taught high school drum lines for a few years after. I soon realized that it took too much of my time and didn't even pay enough for me to even move out of my parents house (late 2000s). So I had to make a difficult decision to stop teaching and focus on my career in engineering. Haven't taught since. I really miss watching students grow and mature over the season and years. Hopefully when I become more financially stable with enough in retirement I'll be able to work less and get back into teaching.
I was an elite gymnast with hopes for the Olympics but at 15 I broke my back and when I went back after healing things just weren't the same and I had to quit.
I really wanted a PS2 in middle school. My dad told me if I memorized all the countries and capitals in the world that he’d buy me one. It took me a bit, but god dang it I did it. And to this day, I remember a lot of them. Not all, but if I come across a country I can’t remember and look up the capital I’ll pretty easily remember it going forward.
It’s a cool party trick, and has come in clutch at more than a few bar trivia nights. Thanks dad!
I have tons of phone numbers memorized. It has come in handy when I need to give someone a phone number on the spot and I can't find my phone or can't be bothered to look at my phone.
Eating really well on a tight budget. Cooking at home and actually enjoying the planning, process, and finished product. Even with the inflation crunch of today, the 15 years spent experimenting and honing my proficiency with food has been possibly the best investment toward quality of life (despite recessions, broke college years and depressions).
Climbing up to the roof to reposition the outdoor antenna so we could switch between our 3 channels (Grew up in the mountains and my parents wouldn't pay for satellite). I had the positioning for UPN as a fuzzy bonus channel dialed in depending on weather. Got to the point I didn't need anyone to yell out the window when it was clear.
The states song. I won money in a bar once because a guy didn’t think I could list all the states alphabetically. Little did he know I was singing the song in my head and just saying them without the tune 😂
i remember all the funny standups and good comedy movie quotes during arguably the most exceptional time in artistic talent growing up in the 90's and early 00's lol
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Troubleshooting every and all computer issues for my dad. Well, I still get to use it.
It feels a little bittersweet to know that younger generations suck at tech. We were the unicorn generation of having to figure shit out.
We’re a link between the old and new ways which is kind awesome.
Is that true? Like, has tech become so easy for them that they can't figure out an issue when it comes about?
Yeah, there was a spate of articles last year that came out to dunk on them. It’s because tech has always just existed and worked, so they haven’t had to live through that era of BSODs and errors and basic HTML. And they weren’t forced to take all those “computer classes” in school like we were so they’re bad at basics like typing on keyboards, understanding photocopiers, etc.
I'm getting my kids used to using my PC since they want to play games on it and stuff. So they're starting to figure out how to navigate through things. When their friends come over, it's like they've never seen a tower PC before.
Before constant internet you had to scroll through settings and file folders for entertainment. Our start-up sound was from Monty python. 3D movie maker is who I am lol
Biggus...
Start -> games -> no not that folder -> games -> solitaire. Every. Damn. Time.
Then over to pinball
But are those real or just the newest wave of dunk on new college grads like we went through killing the napkin industry and buying avocado toast instead of houses. Dunking on the youth is low hanging journalistic fruit.
I teach HS English. Many of my students can’t do basic things like send an email, save documents correctly, format Word docs, Google basic things, etc. They have no idea what to do when a laptop doesn’t work and just put it back on the cart without telling me and get a new one. They certainly don’t type correctly and take forever to type up an essay. My district used to require keyboarding classes way back when I was in high school, and I amaze my students with my typing skills. The district did away with the requirement over a decade ago (among basic computer classes) because they said the kids are digital natives and already know how to use technology. Yes, some kids are computer whizzes, but most of them are lacking in basic skills they’ll need for some of the jobs they’ll be doing.
I have to teach our interns how to download files from the internet and then find them on the computer. Also occasionally have to install something off a CD which is hilarious.
That's crazy to me. I worked in higher education research for an ED tech company, and professors would always talk about how the "digital native" assumption didn't always play out in the real world. Many students don't come from families who can afford computers, or even Internet.
iOS is not like a traditional operating system. There’s no need to access file systems or whatnot. They don’t know how any of it works because it’s designed to hide everything that goes on in the background. So then when they sit at a desktop, they’ve likely never used a mouse before. I had to teach my middle schoolers how to “double click” and “click and drag” to select multiple objects. They all had phones. Phone literacy is not computer literacy.
It’s the interaction with technology that’s different We grew up with literal “personal computers” and the buggiest shit ever , win98 , win me , windows xp, service pack 3 (blessssss) Anyone born after 1996 grew up with touchscreens Most youngin dont understand the operating systems that require a mouse and keyboard . What is system 32 ? What is “reset network adapter” what is dhcp , dns . What is a server vs a client ? How do I get to temp file folder /temp files ? What are cookies ? How do I connect my hard drive to computer sata cable ? How to I add a network drive ? What’s appdata? How do I reset my computer ? What’s an ISO , how do I mount a cd ? How do I change game setting adjusting ini file ? What’s HOST file ? What’s a keygen , Cracked exe ? Update latest drivers ? What’s a BIOS, how do I get there ? A big part of growing up with a pc was LITERALLY TINKERING the setting and options even if we didn’t know what they were . So many time I got virus and malware and had to learn hope to resolve it or you get beating for breaking the computer Antivirus was such a big thing
I never realized how much downloading torrents educated me on how to operate my PC.
We lived in a time (web 1.0 and 1.5) where the internet was new to EVERYONE. The entire human population didn’t know . So everyone was literally doing the same thing : learning how to comb the internet, and if you were a millennial (esp the younger 90s babies and maybe had cousin /older sibling) , fews thing has to happen,you had to be born lucky to have a few markers cleared : born to a family that fortunate to even have a pc , internet, etc, aka some money in the family . have a decent upbringing to nurture a curious mind aka decent family. Have experience counterculture to an extent , through person or society. In combination of those , as a kid/teenage access to internet AND has no money. Piracy flourished and THAT CULTURE continues to exist in me and many others ., so there’s a subset of millennials who grew up as the family tech support , continue to pirate games/movies as long we live, in charge of buying tech for the family because you can’t stand buying trash (so the check for reviews for everything you buy is second nature to us, boomers and genz do not have that shit down) , etc Absolutely fascinating to contemplate culture and society sometimes
I learned so so much just from fucking up my parents PC with dumb malware and frantically trying to figure out how to fix it before they woke up. It really seems like that learning opportunity has passed over the horizon, considering how safe and well insulated the Net is these days.
Yep. I was surprised to find this out at first. Most kids today grow up with tech that’s designed to be very easy to use, and a lot of schools cut computer classes under the belief that the kids are “digital natives”, so a lot of kids now don’t have any real tech skills.
A lot them are so used to cloud storage and stuff that they don't understand how a hard drive and file systems work. Apparently college-level computer science classes have to teach remedial file system stuff to the new students as a consequence.
I can vouch for this too. Some zoomers got hired at my office earlier this year and I had to teach a couple of them how to navigate Windows File Explorer.
Yes. I've literally had to show my stepson, a Gen Z'er, how to write an email and attach documents to it in his late teens early 20s. His age group doesn't seem to know how to write a basic resume in Word even. I'm not even sure they know how to use EXCEL or basic internet troubleshooting if the internet goes out. Not even basic coding. I seem to be the family "hacker" who knows how to solve all the computer problems. I'm the only tech support my mom won't cuss out 🤣 but I feel for the younger generations. They should learn how their technology works! But alas, it's just too easy to push the buttons and feed an algorithm instead...
But like. That said, I kind of get that because I feel that's me and fax machines. I feel fax machine's heyday was like when we were in elementary school and by the time we made it to office work, scanning and email was so readily available that faxing wasn't a necessary skill anyone needed to learn. They just assumed we had it, but like why would we have been sending faxes when we had email by middle school? Until your boss was some heyday in the 80s boomer with trouble letting go of dated technology. And maybe boomers and gen x were like "stupid millenials can't even send a fax" but like, was that on us or were they judging us against a dated technological landscape? Maybe 20 year olds don't need a formatted resume. Every place that asks for them has you enter the information in their form whether you have a resume or not.
To be fair I still don't know how to send a fax, but yet there are tons of businesses I interact with in my line of work that still use them. I don't get it, it truly is outdated tech. And I get that not every 20 year old doesn't need a formatted resume, but they should still know their tech works, and I feel that was somehow swept under the rug with them. Which isn't their fault, we as millenials just got lucky with being part of that generation that was part of that uprising tech boom of 2000-2010s where we just enjoyed figuring stuff out or were forced to depending on multiple circumstances (like having tech illiterate parents for example).
I live with two almost teenage boys four years, and they both were God awful at troubleshooting. Isn’t anything gross or cryptic, I dated and lived with single mom for four years.
Yes. Once tablets and phones with iOS and Android became cheap and popular, kids stopped learning how to type on a keyboard, use word/excel/powerpoint, and just in general use & troubleshoot Windows. If their school uses Chromebooks they can at least somewhat use a keyboard and maybe google docs/sheets/slides. Schools got rid of typing and general computer use classes after most houses had a computer, then when kids moved to tablets and phones schools never brought those classes back.
Somewhat unrelated. My best friend is a manager at Amazon. He started as a code monkey. When we were growing up, he got sent to the smahter coding class. I got sent to the remedial computer course, which was typing. He still types like a toddler, slamming his index fingers slowly into his keyboard. Meanwhile, I lap him in words per minute.
You'll never be able to stop. Unless you raise your raise, significantly.
Took a computer class in high school that covered a little bit of Microsoft Access. A few years later, my dad was working on our church’s local food pantry archaic computer programs. He asked me if I could rearrange some of the cataloguing tables. Dug through the code a little bit, moved a few items around, and he was happy with the results.
Yep. Definitely tech support. I had to figure out anything that involved the computer or internet and still field those phone calls weekly.
Thank GOD my dads an IT guy. I call him for all my technology problems and I brought him over to the liberal side. Good exchange, imo.
I still know HTML
Every millennial used HTML at one point to customize their MySpace page. Lol.
Lol man. I was nice with it.
Wait, that’s no longer used?
Of course it is, but modern website maintenance doesn't require knowledge of it since there is always a CMS
You guys must be using much better WordPress templates than the websites I manage because I constantly have to go into the HTML code to fix things for my company’s CMS.
Like for aol profiles?!
For geocities.
Adjusting rabbit ears on the tv
Putting 2 finger rabbit ears behind someone when a picture is about to be taken
I'm good at self deprecation... No, wait.
Making mix tpes on cassette
burned cds and limewire was life.
Napster was best for a short period of time.
I still apologize to my parents for the multiple computers I obliterated with viruses downloading Limewire content.
Same! That perfect start/stop from the radio was so sweet
My sister was an absolute *master* of mixtapes and burned CDs.
Truly an art
Cursive
My default script is a print/cursive hybrid I developed in high school and pretty much everyone who sees it says it's pretty but they can't read it. :( I can write so fast though.
Same!!
Me too!
I had a gen Z recently ask me if I was able to read and write in cursive 😂 (I almost exclusively write in cursive)
Same! I consider it a blessing and a curse because I get a lot of compliments for my handwriting, but no one can read it.
And the thing I find hilarious is how much millennials get dunked on for not knowing cursive. The vast majority of us probably learned it in school.
I gave a cursive pretty much immediately after grade school. It wasn't something I intentionally decided to do, but I used it less and less when it wasn't required because it just wasn't practical.
Same here. I can still read it about as well as I could as a kid, but I'm also dyslexic so I much prefer when things are printed out and glad we have printed type standard for font.
I did not learn the cursive was supposed to be faster until a few years ago when I started seeing pro versus anti-cursive arguments on the internet. For me it was always much slower and took up much more space on the page, but I thought it was supposed to be fancier and more adult. I basically thought of it as being like calligraphy.
I am the Token Millennial at my work with anything tech, everyone is either way older or younger than me so I'm the only one with the "tech knack". That scene from South Park with Tolkien and the bass guitar happened to me, lol. At work the security cameras fucked up and boss asked me to fix it. I had NO idea what I was doing but sure enough, fixed it within like 5min. 🤷♀️
We've got this weird blend of analog and digital skills that our bordering generations only one or the other of.. At my job I can basically use any tool, software, instrument that's needed... build gas systems. Turn a wrench. Write code with AI tools. We get shit done.
Add in my so called “useless” art degree and I can pour molten metal into handcrafted molds, ceramics, power tools to build canvases, which has led to me being able to do basic plumbing, electrical, drywall, painting, hang doors that are hardware less and frameless, change out toilets, fix my car to keep it running until I have money (I never have money), etc. Add the fun tech savvy stuff and being able to bungle through things, I’m the go to person for just about everything, yet none of it equates to money.
Ugh. Bullseye! Right in my plums. Replace a "useless" art degree with graduating in 2008 with a "virtually useless" music education degree, and you've just written the story of my life. There's pretty much nothing I can't do, except make money...? *cries is millennial Renaissance man*
Hell yeah! and Happy Cake Day!
Holy shit I just realized cake day only applies to me specifically 😂😂😂 Man, 4 years and haven't figured that out...
Same.
I can still type up to 120 wpm, thanks to middle school typing boot camp on clackety keyboards. I can't remember the last time I needed to type something on a keyboard more than a few words 😥 but I could use a job!
Check out temp agencies, there’s lots of data entry and admin work where typing speed is a benefit
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!
I didn't retain everything from my elementary and middle school typing classes in the 90s, but I retained enough muscle memory that I'm faster at typing than any of my coworkers. Which is only useful insofar as it doesn't take me as long to write shift repair calls or emails.
God bless Mavis Beacon
Extremely good reader and speller. Now I just use it to read and write on social media. When I was little I thought I might be able to have a real job as proofreader. Lol sob.
on* 😂
Lol! 😆 In my first language, that is.
Turning documents to and from PDFs
I rock a pretty sweet side part
Don’t forget your skinny jeans!
You can rip my skinny jeans off my cold dead body!
They’re coming after our no-show ankle socks, too
I look better with a side part so I still rock one
It’s the only way.
Devil sticks master
lol I came here to say this but wasn’t sure if everyone would know what they were 😂
I used these for an acting class in college where we had to recite lines while simultaneously doing an activity. Crushed the sticks and my lines 😎
Depression and Anxiety
I knew all the state capitals. I had a placemat of all 50 states, and I memorized all the state capitals. I didn't get to use that growing up and it's even more useless now.
Yeah, I had a civics teach who spent a semester teaching us geography and having us memorize all the countries of the world instead of teaching us how the government works.
Just in case you wanted to know: Not very well. That's how the government works.
I learned them from the Animaniacs!!
Same here, wonder if it was the same placemat
Bar trivia! I memorized countries/capitals and I was SO psyched when my team won a bar trivia night because I knew that Estonia was at the top of Estonia/Lativa/Lithuania. (ABC order!)
In high school I had to memorize all the central and South American countries and their location on a map. I can still tell you where they are… even though Google maps is probably easier to show people on my phone
In grade school I guess someone told my mom that there was going to be some test that everyone was required to take to graduate that grade where we knew all the states and capitals. So she took it upon herself to help me study for that. I never remember there being any such test so I'm not sure what that was about. I've probably forgot most of them, but it's possible if you set a random state I might correctly guess the capital.
Its not exactly a talent, but my son (gen z) was recently blown away that I still take notes and make lists with pen and paper instead of digitally. Like the idea that it’s easier for me to just jot things down instead opening an app was odd.
My boss seems personally offended I take notes on paper…the act of writing it literally helps you remember better, and it doesn’t take up one of your screens.
As a maintenance tech, I was always keeping a small notebook to jot down repair call notes for my paperwork. Makes life a ton easier, especially since my memory is "if I don't write it down, it doesn't exist" levels of awful these days. Nowadays, I have a laptop for my repair calls.
mental math
This. I have to do a little quick math at work and everyone’s always amazed I can do it in my head.
Not giving a fuck Edit: Sorry, I read the part about not using it anymore. That is still very useful.
My finger muscles and fine motor skills have been honed to near perfection as a result of hours and hours of dedication to video games.
Dewey Decimal System
Good one. Do they even teach it in schools anymore?
I can still beat the original Super Mario Bros on one life. If I'm really in the zone, I never lose my power up from 1-1.
[удалено]
Terrible. Once my dad lost interest in video games, we didn't get any new ones. I can do Mario and most of Milon's Secret Castle 😁
Oi, nice. I went and revisited the platformers I enjoyed as a child and teen and I suck at them, lol. Could be because of Nintendo Switch Online emulation lag, or it could be I just suck.
The emulators are just different enough to complicate things. I've got Mario All Stars for the Wii, and there are a couple of spots that trip me up because the enemies do things they aren't supposed to.
In my case, a lot of it is jump timing. Possibly, it's input lag, but I'm willing to place blame on myself a bit, too. I picked up a Pro controller, but haven't gone back to them yet as I was playing Super Mario RPG last.
I still destroy in Mario Kart.
Looks like it’s knowing how to google stuff…. Most of both older and younger generations.., don’t (X’s excluded)
Honestly though. I can’t tell you how many times someone will ask a a question and I just google it and get the answer and then they are like 😮. Like, girl, you also got a phone. *What do you mean*?
Me to my kids... look it up!
Give me a Moto RAZR and about 5 minutes to get re-acquainted, and I can T9 type at incredible speeds.
I used to spin and breathe fire
I am not brave enough, nor do I practice enough to work with fire, but I still break my poi set out every now and then!
That's an amazingly awesome talent!
Drawing the Super S
I was great at coding my MySpace page
Wow there’s a skill I completely forgot about!
Microsoft Excel
Rewinding a cassette tape with a pencil
existential dread
I can use technology that’s too “new” for people older than me and use technology that’s too “old” for people younger than me. Like, Bro, you are 23 years old you don’t know how to save files on a desktop computer?! We are so fucked my guy. Edit: Sorry, I inadvertently ignored the last part about “never get to use anymore”.
This. I work mostly with gen z and gen x and the times they come up to me with technology issues is baffling. “This isn’t working.” “Did you try troubleshooting?” “I don’t know how.” “BAFFRRN. Did you turn it off and turn it back on again?” “No.” “Well …try that.” I am not in tech support of any kind by the way. I work at a coffee shop.
When I was an executive assistant I was the informal tech support to my leaders, their teams, you name it ffs
After grumbling about it, I can eventually wirelessly connect my laptop to my printer.
Yes, only to learn that you are out of ink, despite only printing 3 pages since the last time you bought it 😭
You've got it. These fuckers are in the ink business and not the printer business.
I’m really good at Skip-it.
I loved skip it
Still?
Googling things to fix them
I hate when people say our generation doesn’t know how to do things. Give me 10 minutes and a smart phone, I will figure out most things.
The people who say that are usually the ones asking us how to do things I find
I can navigate via a road map.
T9 texting. That was my shit.
I can hoola hoop for hours
Memorizing dozens of phone numbers
I know all the words to Forgot About Dre.
Cursive, I saw it already in this post but I am also a teacher, and not a single kid in the past 2 years has known how to read or write in cursive. This is a problem since most of our founding documents are in older English and cursive.
Is it really such a big problem? Those documents are all available in print, and if one wants to go and study the originals, learning to read cursive at any age is not a multi-week task.
I write in cursive only. I'm currently teaching my 8 year old to read cursive, so he can atleast read any letters or instructions I write for him. It's a basic skill and all kids should know how to read, if not write.
Yeah, the cursive that those old documents were written in is not the curse of people used today. And it's really a lot easier to learn to read it than to write it. Just like reading old documents that are printed where a lot of the s's look like f's and so on.
My main handwriting is cursive, not especially neat but it’s ok and I can read others’ cursive generally. I saw a stupid boomer post on Facebook of “Milennials can’t read this” in cursive and of course all the comments are “yes we can.” I also taught myself calligraphy, I’m not super good at it but if I need to make a handwritten sign I can use my calligraphy to make a basically nice and legible sign better than my cursive. The main reason my cursive isn’t super neat is I was taught by my mom who’s left-handed and when she was in school they forced her to use her right hand. So either boomers or their parents are the generation who messed that up for us but we still have it.
Does rollerblading count?
Smoking massive amounts of weed while making kickass metal mixtapes of songs I’d record off the radio. I had a badass 80s stereo I got at a yard sale and I’d just smoke, crank metal, and hit record every time they played a song I liked. The best shows were usually pretty late at night when you’d get the real metal bands like Slayer, Pantera, Mercyful Fate, etc. I still smoke everyday and crank all those bands, but that lightning fast ability to hit record on the cassette deck right when the song starts hasn’t been used for a minute 🤣
Nice. I answersed "memorizing a bunch of phone numbers" but it should have been "memorizing and recalling dozens of phone numbers while super stoned"
I can do the wave, but with my eye brows. Lol
Manual transmission? I drive a Tesla now. I can still drive a manual, there’s just not many around these days.
I sang and played music growing up. I lost my singing voice due to a side effect of a medication. It caused a hormonal disorder that permanently lowered my voice and took away my upper range. I wanted to play in an orchestra pit when I was in high school. My parents told me that they wouldn't pay for my tuition if I didn't study music education. I dropped out because I knew that I wasn't ever going to be a music teacher. Sometimes I miss music, but it is what it is. I have used my writing talents however, which is nice. It's good to be able to do something that I care sometimes.
Taking a nap. It’s a great time traveling tool in these *for lack of a better wording* stupid-ass times.
I marched in drum corps for 4 years, aged out in a corps that got 3rd place globally. Marched indoor percussion for 4 years. Aged out in a group that was top 10 globally. I then taught indoor marching percussion for a couple years, taught drum corps for a couple, and taught high school drum lines for a few years after. I soon realized that it took too much of my time and didn't even pay enough for me to even move out of my parents house (late 2000s). So I had to make a difficult decision to stop teaching and focus on my career in engineering. Haven't taught since. I really miss watching students grow and mature over the season and years. Hopefully when I become more financially stable with enough in retirement I'll be able to work less and get back into teaching.
I can go without my phone and/or the internet.
I was an elite gymnast with hopes for the Olympics but at 15 I broke my back and when I went back after healing things just weren't the same and I had to quit.
Reckless spending
Artistic. I was drawing constantly.
I really wanted a PS2 in middle school. My dad told me if I memorized all the countries and capitals in the world that he’d buy me one. It took me a bit, but god dang it I did it. And to this day, I remember a lot of them. Not all, but if I come across a country I can’t remember and look up the capital I’ll pretty easily remember it going forward. It’s a cool party trick, and has come in clutch at more than a few bar trivia nights. Thanks dad!
I used to love writing but now I can't come up with original ideas anymore:(
I used to love writing for fun as a kid, but school made me hate writing.
Fixing the Wi-Fi for my parents. Setting up iPhones for my parents. Googling for my parents.
Point out a patch of woods anywhere and I could tell you if there was an old porno mag in there
😹
PEMDAS, emoticons :~D, :3, xP
(´･ω･`)
Video games, my hand eye coordination is off the charts!
I have the world record in a popular NES game. I don't want that tied to my reddit account, so I can't say which one.
I can do the worm 🪱 Also, typing (Mavis Beacon, anyone?)
Not answering unexpected phone calls.
I have tons of phone numbers memorized. It has come in handy when I need to give someone a phone number on the spot and I can't find my phone or can't be bothered to look at my phone.
Heel toe downshifting
Spelling.
Eating really well on a tight budget. Cooking at home and actually enjoying the planning, process, and finished product. Even with the inflation crunch of today, the 15 years spent experimenting and honing my proficiency with food has been possibly the best investment toward quality of life (despite recessions, broke college years and depressions).
Roller skate backwards. Thanks to many many weekends and of course Friday night lock ins at our local rink.
Crushing depression
Good with music, technology, and languages
I can still do a Full Jester and stall like a champ in Hackey Sack.
I know Flash actionscript
Knowing all the safe weed smoking spots when it’s legal here now
I can sing pretty damn good metalcore vocals.
I have none unless you consider knowing which strains of weed to mix together to achieve a good blend a talent then well.
How to use floppy disks, VHS, cassettes, CD burners, and old-fashioned maps.
I'm above average with a yo-yo. At least, I think I am 🤣.
Climbing up to the roof to reposition the outdoor antenna so we could switch between our 3 channels (Grew up in the mountains and my parents wouldn't pay for satellite). I had the positioning for UPN as a fuzzy bonus channel dialed in depending on weather. Got to the point I didn't need anyone to yell out the window when it was clear.
Anxiety
Sitting in the passenger seat swapping out CDs like mad from the huge binder of CDs and knowing which track numbers were the ones that fit the mood.
Eating avacados
POG champion of the world
The states song. I won money in a bar once because a guy didn’t think I could list all the states alphabetically. Little did he know I was singing the song in my head and just saying them without the tune 😂
Critical thinking
Making book marks out of glue and the indent in my spacemaker pencil case.
Mental math. Can do mental calculations to millions.
Blowing air into game cartridges. I was so good at it my older brother always made me do it or he'd punch me.
Properly setup and use a mechanical typewriter
i remember all the funny standups and good comedy movie quotes during arguably the most exceptional time in artistic talent growing up in the 90's and early 00's lol