Confessions of a blank generation alpha geek

Blank Generation

It star­ted a couple of weeks beek read­ing Nath­an­ael B’s post on Gen Y work­ers in the Gen X work­place. I thought I bet­ter check that I was Gen X before com­ment­ing, so off to the author­ity of wiki­pe­dia.

How­ever, depend­ing on what art­icle I read on wiki­pe­dia I was Gen X, a Baby Boomer or mem­ber of the 12th Gen­er­a­tion, which was called Lost Gen­er­a­tion one week on Wiki­pe­dia only to be replace by an amer­ic­an­isa­tion with Gen­er­a­tion Jones this week. Per­son­ally I show a mix of Gen X and Gen Y char­ac­ter­ist­ics, but I am a little older, so I will settle to tag Richard Hell gave our gen­er­a­tion the Blank Generation.

And Nath­an­ael if you thought work­ing in a Gen X envir­on­ment was a cul­ture shock, one of my first jobs in the pub­lic sec­tor was work­ing in a dis­creet sec­tion, where the boss and the two other senior staff, includ­ing my super­visor, star­ted work­ing for when the left the armed forces after WWII, and where still there 40 years later. It would of been a shock for young baby boomer in the six­ties to go to work in that office, so you ima­gine what is was like for me in eighties.

Alpha Geek

I never con­sidered myself to on the bleed­ing edge of tech­no­logy. For the last eight years or so, I have been a skilled front end web developer keep­ing up with the last­est devel­op­ments and a little bit of Mac geek. But that was about it, up until three years ago, I did not own a mobile phone, my only con­nec­tion to the inter­net was dial up and I did not blog and rarely used IM.

Over the last three years, I have increased my use of tech­no­logy and tech­no­logy ser­vices, par­tic­u­larly in the mobile space to the level where I am seek­ing on new tech­no­logy and ser­vices, like the last couple of week­ends explor­ing ser­vices like Plurk, BrightKite and Ping.fm.

The real tip­ping point came a week ago on the train into work, for the 28 minute jour­ney, I am usu­ally con­nec­ted and using the net either via the 3G card modem in my Mac­Book Pro or via my phone. The train stopped prior to enter­ing a sta­tion, wait­ing for the train in front to clear the plat­form, not an unusual occur­rence. But this time it was in a tun­nel and I was left without a net con­nec­tion, for a few minutes.

It was then I real­ised I just expect to be always con­nec­ted to the net. At work and home, there is always a com­puter con­nec­ted and wifi for my laptop and other devices, out and about I have my 3G modem card and phone. In that tun­nel I just felt dis­con­nect from the world.

So I have will­ing tagged myself a blank gen­er­a­tion alpha geek until I tech­no­logy gets away from me.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.