Now that we’ve reached the charming-bordering-on-annoying-curmudgeon stage of our rapidly declining lives, we’ve started to notice a thing going on with the young folks at our office.
No, not the fact they are constantly staring at their phones or shuffle their feet while they walk or look blankly at us when we make hilarious references to Bootsauce songs and albums — we’re over that — it’s their cleaning habits. Specifically, they are fastidious when it comes to anything food or drink related. Painfully so.
On a number of occasions, we have found ourselves in the unfortunate position of waiting to use our office’s kitchen sink while watching a millennial spend several minutes rinsing out their coffee cup. Normally, we would chalk this up to a case of OCD, but it’s happened to us a number of times, with different young people rinsing their coffee cups for longer than it takes us to have a shower.
A colleague of ours noticed a similar behaviour just this morning, while waiting for a young’un to rinse her apple. It took five minutes. And she didn’t even take an Instagram shot of it afterwards.
So what’s going on?
We have a few theories.
Theory #1: Millennials don’t have a clue about washing dishes or apples because they grew up protected from such harsh realities by their parents who worried that subjecting them to house work could be triggering.
Theory #2: Millennials haven’t been exposed to as much dirt, rot and germs as previous free-range generations and are rightfully extra careful about the cleanliness of their coffee cups and apples.
Theory #3: Older generations (read: us) are filthy. They only started recognizing the importance of condoms in the 1980s, their hair can go unwashed for days, hand soap still seems “trendy” and the only reason to rinse a coffee cup or apple for more than five seconds, if at all, is if it smells or looks funky.
The thing is, it’s possible that all three theories are correct. Or maybe we’ve overlooked something… just like so many people overlooked the raw intensity of Bootsauce’s "Sleeping Bootie".
Seriously, though. Let us know if you have any other theories about this generational divide in our office kitchen before we totally lose our shit.
