It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Should I speak up about an inappropriate song in children’s theater?
I’m a volunteer in a community theater production for young children between five and seven years old. Our current show involves a dance number that takes place in ancient Egypt, and there’s a recent change to the production that I feel uncomfortable with. The children were originally dancing to “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles, but then the coordinator changed it by “popular demand” to a different song called “Camel by Camel.” This decision on its own seems innocuous albeit strange. The song itself is alright, but I unfortunately know some outside context that gives me pause.
There’s a famous meme of a video game character dancing to this song. The video is explicitly pornographic, which was an important part of the appeal. Although there are family-friendly versions of the meme, the adult aspect is always associated with it, and this song is now associated with that adult aspect by proxy.
Something that eventually became part of the joke was that unsuspecting people (such as your grandma on Facebook) would share more appropriate parts of the meme saying, “Look at this adorable Egyptian cat I found!” And then all the grandkids would exchange glances wondering whether someone should break the news. This is what’s raising my eyebrows in particular, because I feel like if someone is making these kids dance to the song because of THAT, it’s a step too far, even if the children are completely unaware. The way the children are dancing is not the same suggestive way the character dances, although there is still clapping and hip-moving to the music.
The coordinator is a kindergarten teacher in her 50s, and I don’t think she’s aware of the context behind the song. It perhaps wouldn’t bother me if she had chosen it herself, but I don’t know what she meant by “popular demand.” The other volunteers are all either high school or college-aged, which makes me concerned if one of them suggested it.
Additionally, the parents in the audience will be Millennials and older Zoomers, who are more likely to know the meme. The last thing we need are complaints from parents because their five-year-old is dancing to THAT SONG.
Is there a professional way to broach this topic to an innocent old lady? Is there a way to ask how the decision to change the song came about? What if one of the other volunteers suggested it as an inside joke to make children dance to a porn song? Or am I perhaps making a problem out of nothing and should just keep it to myself?
Yes, speak up! If there’s a likelihood that some parents in the audience are going to know the meme and be upset, it’s far better for the teacher to hear that now than to be blindsided when parents are angry.
Just be straightforward! “I’m guessing you’re not aware of this, but using that song might seem wrong to some parents — it’s part of a very adult-oriented internet meme, and that’s a lot of people’s first association with the song. Enough people know about it that we risk complaints and I didn’t want you to be blindsided if that happens.” (Note that this language doesn’t get into trying to sort out who first suggested the song, since ultimately that’s not yours to sort out; you’re just alerting her that there is in fact an issue with it.)
Also, um, women in our fifties are not “innocent old ladies,” WTF. If she can’t handle this news, it’s not because of her age. (Although it does remind me of this.)
2. We’re feds with a coworker who won’t stop insisting everything is fine
I’m a fed. My office of less than 20 people has a director (who took the fork in the road deal), a deputy (who lives several states away from the rest of us), and two team managers, Arwen and Fergus. Fergus suffered an unimaginable personal tragedy less than six months ago. We all think this is why he can’t handle what’s happening now. (He may have also voted for this, so there’s that.) He’s constantly telling us that we’re blowing things out of proportion when we raise concerns about losing our jobs or other things that are happening. My manager, Arwen, has talked to him on more than one occasion, but he just doesn’t get it. Listening to him go on and on (unprompted!) about how we’re all going to keep our jobs and we have nothing to worry about makes us more anxious!
We’ll all be back in the office soon, and avoiding him is going to be harder. Arwen is my direct manager, so I’m shielded a little bit, but our teams are small and most of us do work for both teams. The deputy is not very hands-on about this stuff and will not be physically in our office. Is there any way to get through to him? Is there any way I can politely get out of conversations with him? We’re all at a loss.
Your manager, Arwen, is the one best positioned to handle this, and since she’s done it in the past, you have evidence that she shares your concern about it and is willing to address it — so you should go back to her and let her know that it’s still happening and it’s incredibly demoralizing at an already stressful time, and ask if she can tell him that he needs to cut it out for everyone’s mental health and ability to focus on their jobs.
That said, what would happen if you also addressed it in the moment when it’s happening? “It’s hard to navigate this with you denying it’s happening. If you’re not concerned about it yourself, please respect that the rest of us are” would be a reasonable thing to say.
Of course, it’s also true that if the rest of you are talking about it, Fergus is entitled to share his perspective, and so it likely makes sense to avoid raising it around him at all, to the extent that you can. But given that it’s affecting actual work, your ability to plan, etc., you presumably can’t avoid the topic with him entirely and you need him to be able to engage with reality for those conversations — and plus you said he’s doing this unprompted too.
Related:
I manage an employee who pushes too much positivity on her team
3. Who pays for coffee in informal business meetings?
Relatively minor question, but who pays for coffee in informal business meetings? Is it who is more senior, who makes more money, or who asked for the coffee?
The context is that it is common in my profession to work for a couple years and then go get your PhD. That is what I did, and I am currently in a well-regarded PhD program. Some people from my former organization have since gotten into the program and want to talk to me about my experience. So I’m technically more senior, but they asked for the coffee, and we both know that they make significantly more money than me. I’ve just been paying for myself, but am I committing a faux pas? Also, I don’t know if gender dynamics come into play at all.
The etiquette is that the person who asked for the coffee is supposed to pay for both of you; you are taking your time to do them a favor (letting them pick your brain) and so they cover your drink. That said, in situations where the person asking is, say, a 20-year-old college student, you might still cover it anyway because you more senior and clearly better paid. But they should come prepared to pay, and they should proceed as if they are paying until and unless you announce that you’re covering it. You don’t have that factor in your mix, though, so it’s just the standard rule — the person who invites the other and is requesting the favor pays.
You’re not committing a faux pas by paying for yourself, but it’s also fine to let them get it.
Gender doesn’t come into it at all.
Related:
who should pay at a networking coffee or lunch?
4. How can I keep track of what I’ll want to remember for future reference checks?
I manage three to six interns a year, which became part of my job about a year ago after having managed intermittently before then. So far, it’s been very easy to keep track of them; a potential employer for my first intern here just asked me for a call, and I feel confident that I remember enough about that intern’s strengths, weaknesses, etc. to give her a useful reference. But as a person with a fairly average memory and a lot on my plate in addition to one or two interns a semester, I imagine that it’s eventually going to get hard! What if she stays at that job for a few years and needs a reference after that, because I’ll still be one of her most recent bosses other than the one at her current job? That’s about 10 to 15 former interns at a time whom I might feasibly serve as a reference for and need to remember reasonably well!
I’d love to hear about common strategies people use to keep track of past interns, or past short-term employees more generally. Should I just write down everything I think I would want to say in a reference call around the end of an internship? Maybe I’ve answered my own question there, but I still think learning about how others do it would help me — my predecessor here had an obnoxiously good memory, so his “system” was just to remember everyone in detail.
I have an answer to this that kills two birds with one stone. (What a horrid expression, can we please come up with a better one? I went looking and saw someone suggest “feed two birds with one scone,” which I enjoy.)
At the end of each person’s internship, ideally you’d give them some feedback on how things went. As part of that, jot down some notes for yourself about what you saw as their strengths, areas where they should work on improving, feedback on big projects, etc. Meet with them as their internship is ending and talk through that feedback! That’s a big benefit to them; it’s the sort of feedback you should be providing anyway, and summing it all up can help them synthesize useful takeaways from the experience (and so often at that stage, they’re just figuring out what they’re all about as professionals and what they’re good at, so having someone talk it through with them can be hugely helpful). And then save those notes, because those will jog your memory when you’re asked to give them a reference later on.
Two birds, one scone!
5. Employee keeps working unpaid overtime and lies about it
A manager position below me is currently vacant, and so the team that person would normally manage doesn’t have a manager right now. We have a supervisor from a different team floating around occasionally for general supervision in their area.
I saw one of the employees on that team, Pam, working several hours past her normal finish time. (She is paid hourly.) As with previous occasions when she did this, I told her to stop working and go home. She insisted she had clocked out already and was simply staying behind to “help out” and didn’t want to be paid past her normal hours.
Since this wasn’t the first time we had this exact conversation, I called her aside for a meeting the next day. I explained she wasn’t allowed to work extra hours for free. Bizarrely, she flatly denied this ever happened. She claimed she properly reported and was paid for all overtime.
When I mentioned prior examples that proved otherwise, she gave nonsensical excuses for each occasion. This wasn’t an “oh, I see where you might have misunderstood” situation. She outright lied. As an example, she said the unpaid overtime she did a couple of weeks ago was because the roster was printed incorrectly and that she emailed payroll about it already and payroll responded. This … just didn’t happen. Both the alleged incorrect printing and the email with payroll. Also, she knows how to put through changes on the time sheet, and it is never, ever done by email.
I’m at a loss. We have dealt with employees faking time sheets by adding hours they never worked. We never had anyone illicitly trying to perform free labor. If this happens again, how should we deal with Pam?
You’ve got two big problems here (and sadly, no scone): first, Pam is exposing your company to legal liability if you don’t pay her for all the hours she works, whether she reports them or not. Second, Pam apparently tells bizarrely flagrant lies.
At a minimum, you should tell Pam that working unreported hours is a fireable offense, that this is her final warning, and that if it happens again you will need to let her go. That part is simple. But beyond that, I’d start poking around in Pam’s work more deeply, because the lying is weird enough that it’s very, very likely that there are other significant problems in her work that you’ll uncover if you start looking for them. Every time I’ve seen someone lie in this way, it’s been the tip of the iceberg.
#1, please do speak up. This is not just about what associations it brings up for adults, there’s a real risk that the kids who enjoy dancing to the song will look it up to dance yo at home and end up with bad content.
It’s amazing how little care people take when picking music for kids sometimes. The primary (ages 5-12) school near me plays pop music over the loud speaker before the morning bell. A song that’s been in regular rotation for a while is Katy Perry’s California Girls. Yikes!
“A song that’s been in regular rotation for a while is Katy Perry’s California Girls.”
Haven’t listened to the song in a while, but assuming it’s the radio edit version and not an explicit version, most things in the song will go over the kids heads. Disney does this with a lot of movies/jokes, humor aimed at the parents that the kids don’t get.
honestly a lot of songs have lyrics that go over most adults/people’s heads when just listening to it in the background. I’ve had tons of songs take on different meaning once actually read/listened to the lyrics and thought about them.
So the song on the overhead i don’t think is a big deal, but suspect that is a difference of opinion.
I am regularly surprised how little most people listen to lyrics.
I remember as a preteen a lot of music that we’d listen to as a family did have content that was, if one actually paid attention, sexual in nature. My parents apparently do not pay attention, but I always have. I remember being very surprised making references to lyrics in conversation with them and they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. A lot of the specifics probably did go way over my head (other than “oh, must be about sex”).
Now, I’m not one to think children should be shielded from any reference to the existence of sex. I think making it less of a secret forbidden fruit is better for them in the long run. Children’s dance recitals to suggestive lyrics do always make me a bit uncomfortable, though.
I may have told this story before on AAM, but when I was at university my job in the summer holidays was as a waitress/barmaid in a local hotel that did a lot of weddings. The resident DJ had three stock first dance songs which most couples seemed to default to: You’re Still The One by Shania Twain, Amazed by Lonestar, and… You’re Beautiful by James Blunt. The amount of couples who picked the last one was not zero, and it always amazed that people weren’t listening to the lyrics. To this day I’m convinced that DJ was absolutely trolling people.
The number of couples who decide that their song is “Every Breath You Take” by the Police is genuinely alarming.
I remember hearing that played over the loudspeaker in a store and muttering “Oh, hell, the stalker song!” Aghast at my lese majeste, a nearby man exclaimed “But that’s The Police!” “I don’t care if it’s the whole damn FBI, that song is totally creepy!” I snapped.
(And yes, of course I knew what he meant – I just didn’t think that the group’s fame justified that godawful song!)
I’ve read a few quotes to the effect that Sting himself is somewhat horrified that people think it’s a romantic love song.
He also directly parodied it, in the closing lyrics of “Love is the Seventh Wave”: “Every breath you take, every move you make, every cake you bake, every leg you break.”
Sting very much intended it to be a stalker song, and not a happy love song. Most of the Police’s output was carefully crafted storytelling about something other than sweet romance. I mean, just look at every other song on the album Every Breath you Take comes from…
The fault isn’t in the writer, it’s in the listeners.
RIGHT????
It reminds me of the rash of weddings where “I Will Always Love You” was the first dance song.
Or My Heart Will Go On.
I used to like “The One I Love” by REM, but the lyrics always gave me pause. Then I read them closely and read some of the comments by the band and I just skip it now when it comes up on Tidal. I do still like Shiny Happy People, that one has a problematic inspiration but the lyrics themselves are joyful…
Robbie Williams Angels at weddings – she’s dead in that song!
I was at a wedding where the groom, bride, and full wedding party entered to a song that’s about losing one’s virginity. They had never listened to the lyrics but “it sounded nice”. This couple had been living together for years and this was not a “at least pretend to not have sex before marriage” community, which somehow made it worse. Really, the couple “just don’t listen to music” so they used that one.
Part A) For a lot of people lyrics sound like “Oh BaAAaaaby! Nah nah, oh yeah, something, and like… yeah, ooh baby!” The song Louie Louie exploits this by having lyrics that no one can understand, though people suspect they are risqué.
Part B) There was a past discussion here re writing down song lyrics while scribbling at work. Where something that seemed alarming in the context “this is what Bruce was thinking during the meeting” abruptly became innocuous when someone added the context “those are the lyrics to a pop song.” So it does seem to hit quite differently if its a screed you penned yourself, versus a song you’ve heard in the background 50 times without really registering the lyrics.
We were listening to a song that went “Baby, don’t hurt me no more” and my son asked why that person was worried a baby would hurt them and now sometimes I listen to songs to try to figure out what a kid is imaging happening here – while my kid continues to wonder why there are so many songs about babies.
Thanks, now I have What Is Love stuck in my head for the millionth time this year.
I was raised on show tunes. There is a line in a song in The Music Man, the Sadder but Wiser girl, that says “I hope and I pray for Hester to win just one more A.” At age 8, I presumed this was about Hester being forbidden to marry until she completed school (where she was presumably getting all A grades.)
I can’t remember if I learned who Hester Pryne actually was before I read A Scarlet Letter in high school or not.
You sound like me (also raised on show tunes and musicals). When I was about the same age, I assumed that the dialogue in Grease between Rizzo and Marty (“I skipped a period.” “Do you think you’re PG?”) meant that Rizzo had skipped a class at school, and Marty was asking if she thought such behavior was rated PG (with the implication that it was probably PG-13 instead).
yup
but also joking aside, I learned a TON of history from musicals, or rather from asking questions or looking up things I didn’t understand from musicals. Annie – the depression. Sound of Music/South Pacific – WW 2. Oklahoma! – the settling of the American west. King and I – colonialism.
The key was knowing that I didn’t know – for Hester I thought I knew what an A was.
That’s right up there with the “pussy wagon” line in Greased Lightning from…Grease. It amazes me that that show/soundtrack is still seen as so “Wholesome 50s” when it deals with things like possible teen pregnancy as a storyline.
I straight up did not understand the joke that was being made by drawing out Balzac’s name like that until I was an adult.
I am an adult who used to be a theater kid and I *just* got that.
…I was today years old when I understood the joke!
In the movie, the song is sung in front of an 8-year-old girl! (Or thereabouts.) What the hell, classic movie musical? (It’s not just that line. The whole song is Harold Hill saying he wants a girl who puts out.)
My Mum would sing Jamaica Farewell. I must have been about 4
I heard this:
But I’m sad to say I’m on my way
Won’t be back for many a day
My heart is down
My head is turning around
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town
I can still feel that feeling – MUMMY – why did he just leave his little girl behind???
Bless her, she immediately got it and explained it (as well as possible)
Oh dang, I was today years old when I learned that this wasn’t about leaving a child behind (to go work or something).
I was a teenager in the ’80s, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized what “She Bop” and “I Touch Myself” were really about.
lol, same – I had a similar moment when I understood Last Dance With Mary Jane, many years later than I should admit to!
Same here, and now I love Last Dance with Mary Jane because Tom Petty was always so edgy that way. And if you don’t know by lyrics the video will spell it out for you. But on this note I grew up loving songs by 10CC, having NO idea what that band name meant. Also I didn’t realize Rosie and Redneck Friend by Jackson Browne were about sex because he kinda hid that so it wasn’t an obvious thing. As an adult I know it now, but back then no clue.
Time for me to show my ignorance, I get 10 cc meaning 10 ml in a medical context, how is 10cc anything inappropriate?
It is purportedly the volume of fluid released in an ejaculation.
“I Touch Myself” even had sound effects! I have no idea why I didn’t figure that one out sooner.
Speaking of sound effects, I also wonder how many people wearing “FRANKIE SAY RELAX” shirts back in the ’80s knew what that song was about.
Another “OMG they got away with THAT?” moment!
BBC’s improvised panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue has repeatedly used “Relax” in its “One Song to the Tune of Another” round, precisely because the lyrics are not ambiguous and become even more obvious when set to a slower-tempo melody, e.g. “The Winner Takes It All”.
Don’t forget about “Dancing with myself” by the all-time great Billy Idol.
Omg I never made that connection in my brain lol… I seriously just thought he was out on the dance floor…
I remember there was an episode of Buffy that referenced I touch myself and was all ‘oh that’s what that song means’ and I think it still took me a few years after that to finally get it.
LOL! What did you think “I Touch Myself” was about? I was 13 when the song was popular, and I knew *exactly* what it meant!
I’m ashamed to admit how old I was when I realized that the Little Red Corvette was about sex. I always was puzzled by those pockets full of horses…
Innocent 50+ old lady here- yup, the 80’s had a lot of naughty!
60+ lady here, and there was a lot of naughty in the 60s and 70s, too. It wasn’t all rock and roll, either; I’ve heard plenty of naughty things in country music.
Hahaha, cue people using “I Will Always Love You” at weddings.
“Brown-Eyed Girl” as a father-daughter dance is the one that always makes me wince
As a Van Morrison fan, ouch! Not appropriate!
When my late wife and I were talking to the wedding DJ, we gave him a short list of songs NOT to play. Sure enough, near the end of his set he puts on Billy Idol’s White Wedding… and my younger sister jumps up and drags me onto the dance floor! We had a good laugh about it, nothing to spoil the event :-)
Speaking of Bruce–Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” is filthy in ways I didn’t think about until Tori Amos covered it.
Yeah, the video is about a man *almost* having an affair with an extremely hot married woman, but resisting temptation at the last moment… and is less dirty than the song.
I’ve definitely noticed how many people don’t pay attention to lyrics. I remember doing square dancing to achy breaks heart or the Macarena as a kid and now it’s like Uhhhh they played this in school.
The upside is I now know why my mom was mortified when 4 year old me sung my heart out to Love Shack by B-52s and I think it’s hilarious.
“Tiiiiiin roof!”
Love Shack is slightly risque but pretty mild by most standards! (OK, so there is a reference to a mattress…)
My parents have always liked Billy Joel, so I grew up listening to his albums. I distinctly remember being about 5 when my dad got a cassette from the gas station (buy X gallons, get a cassette tape) with “Captain Jack” – and I would sing along every time.
Coming back to that song as an adult – good gravy, I can’t imagine what my dad thought listening to me sing about … uh, every single thing in that song.
(I genuinely thought that “Captain Jack” was a guy with a boat and the “little push and you’ll be smiling” was about pushing off from the dock.)
I’ve discovered that my husband doesn’t really hear the lyrics to songs *at all*, so after a few conversations of “please don’t play that song, it uses a word I really don’t want to hear” he’s decided to only play radio edits of songs around our kiddo, just to get out ahead of specific words. The themes, well, we’ll see how that goes.
I did quite the spit take when they started playing “Shut Up and Drive” in Wreck-it Ralph. They cut out the (many) explicitly sex-related lines, so I’m sure a bunch of kids were later shocked to discover it wasn’t a song about racing cars.
“I like to move it” by Reel2Real on Madagascar was not exactly appropriate either. “Physically fit” does not mean in good cardiovascular health. Sacha Baron Cohen absolutely must have known, he is my age and that song was massive in the UK in 1994.
Carnival cruises used Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” to advertise in a very family-centric ad. It’s about using heroin.
People do know that “Mr Brownstone” by GNR isn’t about a guy who lives in a house made from sandstone, right?
Heroin. It’s about heroin.
My go-to example for “people don’t pay attention to the lyrics” is Angel by Sarah Maclachlan. When it first came out, I’d hear people dedicating it to their loved ones on the radio, and I was always puzzled by this because it sounded like such a sad song to me. I remember one girl calling in to the station to request it for her grandmother, because “she’s the angel in my life.” And, of course, the song went viral when it was used in sad ASPCA commercials for years.
Small trigger warning for drugs: the “angel” in the song is actually heroin, and she was in fact writing about a person she knew who OD’d. The lyrics completely give it away if you listen to the whole song.
Exactly. It blew my mind when that song was a hit how often people thought of it as romantic or sweet–it’s literally about an OD.
wait, so when I see the sad ASPCA commercials, she’s really singing about drugs??
Yepper!
See Alvin and the Chipmunks with “Semicharmed Kind of Life”.
There are so many kids who are going to grow up and be “the chipmunks were singing about METH?”
That was my first thought here. I love the phrasing in that song and its title but the MEANING, whoof.
I grew up singing along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on the car radio. Cute song about lions, right? Only it was about the sex or drug culture of the 60s. (It’s been awhile since I’ve listened to it.) Harmless to sing along on the car radio, and no videos back then, but I think if you had a group of young kids singing it at a school concert today, or possibly even in 1968, parents would get it and at least some would find it…odd…
I have to object to that interpretation because it predates the sixties. Pete Seeger performing it in concert credited African origins and explained it was a coded anti-colonial message. the lion was the Zulu people who would one day be independent again. There’s plenty more online including that mysterious “wimoweh” is a misheard lyric.
“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is not about sex or drugs, and its definitely not about 1960s sex or drug culture, since it was written in 1939. Although both the 1940s version by The Weavers and the 1960s version by The Tokens have some different lyrics from the original, which was written in Zulu, none of the changes have anything to do with sex or drugs. It appears in “The Lion King” and is commonly sung by young children at school and choir concerts and nobody finds it odd because there is nothing odd about it.
I should have mentioned that the original is by Solomon Linda, since he often isn’t properly credited.
Thank you. I grew up with the Pete Seeger and Weavers versions and was very confused….
Thanks for explaining! Singing it recently I found that it works well as a lullaby.
The only controversy around that one in my group was exactly what syllables you were supposed to sing for the non word parts “A-wheem a-way?” “A-weem A-wet?” “Whimble-whip?”
“A weem away? A wing away?”
Do you remember the original Chipmunk movie The Great Chipmunk Adventure? Because that movie had the Chipettes singing a song while dressed in harem clothes about getting lucky. The chipmunks have never had very good moral lines.
In The Muppets (the recent one with Jason Segel), Gonzo’s chickens clucked out “Forget You,” sung originally by Cee Lo Green. Let’s just say that Forget You is the radio edit, and even the title is not actually appropriate.
In the same movie, they also did Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and simply had Beaker “mi mi mi” through the controversial words. The Muppets have been using similar tactics for years, like when they had Animal sing parts of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Also The Muppets came out in 2011, so it’s not really recent T_T
Oh you mean that specific movie… some of us were in our 50s in 2011 :-)
It’s recent compared to the OG Muppet Movie from 1979. I think that’s the distinction here.
The Muppets have never been just for kids. A pilot for the Muppets show in 1976 was called “Sex and Violence” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Muppet_Show_episodes
I laughed so hard at that in The Muppets that I couldn’t breathe.
This was the first song that I remember hearing on the radio that started me to question all the other song lyrics – I was a preteen and starting to understand the references.
Alvin and the Chipmunks is amazing/horrible for this. There’s a licensed Playstation 2 rhythm game that includes “Love Shack”, “Tubthumping” (edited to replace all alcohol references with soft drinks), and “December” (“don’t scream aloud, don’t think aloud, turn your head and spit me out”). The president of the company that developed it was criminally charged with wage theft about a year after release, and ever since I found out, I’ve wondered if the song choices came from an angry unpaid employee.
Yeah, little kids definitely don’t pick up on things. When I was little, I loved the song Afternoon Delight — clearly about a treat after school! And I remember being horrified as an adult watching kids dance and sing to Hot in Herre, before I realized they were just thinking, “Sure, the weather is hot, you don’t want to wear a lot of clothes!”
OMG I remember Afternoon Delight, and yeah I didn’t really get it as a kid either, and now it’s like….DAMN they really did spell it out in here didn’t they!
omg yes, one of the best, cringiest Arrested Development scenes (on two occasions!) going
I love that AD scene- where Michael slowly realizes what he is singing to/with his niece!
On an episode of Kipo & the Age of Wonderbeasts (which is a great cartoon that I dearly love), they played a song in the background that intrigued me, so I looked it up. The scene was very cute and family friendly. The song itself…well, it’s kind of a sweet song about sharing with others. It’s just what they’re sharing is definitely ecstasy.
Cracks me up every time I hear it and now I have it on a couple playlists.
Never assume the content is going over kids’ heads. I remember a lot of serious news stories and scandals from as far back as when I was 5 (which I assume my parents didn’t realize I was paying attention to). I also picked up on songs and movie situations that made me uncomfortable before I knew how articulate why, going back to elementary school (largely issues of sexism and sexual content.) And of course, all of those “hidden” Disney “jokes” became pretty clear around 6th grade, even pre-internet when you either had to hear it by word of mouth or notice it yourself.
I absolutely spent a good portion of a sleepover when I was in high school trying to stop my VHS of the Lion King in just the right spot to see the pollen dust spell out “sex” (never managed it).
You gotta get the Laser Disc for that. (Not actually sure about that, I assume by the time Lion King came out they were a little more savvy about that? But if you want to see Jessica Rabbit uncensored you have to get the movie on laser disc because they deleted the relevant frame from the DVD)
That’s exactly the Disney movie I was thinking of, I did the same after hearing about it at school. I think I got it to where it *maybe* vaguely sort-of-spelled it, but I do think the story is exaggerated.
fwiw, it was spelling “sfx” – special effects was the team that worked on the particle sim (or the 90s equivalent) for that shot.
Thinking back to “She-Bop” off Cindy Lauper’s She’s So Unusual album, this innocent elderly lady agrees.
A coworker congratulated a younger colleage on the birth of his son, saying, “You can be like the father and son in ‘Cat’s in the Cradle!'”
She had never listened to the lyrics.
AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!
And that’s not even a song with words that are hard to understand when you listen to it. Good lord, it’s heartbreaking.
In my childhood I used to love skating at the skating rink to “let’s pretend we’re married” which, if I thought about it all, I assumed was about playing house or something. I heard the song as an adult and clutched my pearls!
If one kid realises there’s an inside joke they’ll look it up and/or spread it around. There’s a specific laugh/giggle that seemingly every teen in history makes when they think they’ve got dodgy content past the adults. Think the joke from Wayne’s World where they say “asphinctersayswhat?” really fast, we all said that back in the day without even knowing what the mumbled word was, we just knew it was rude and therefore funny. I meet a lot of high school classes for one-off events and there’s always one who tries to get something past us. Usually it’s just memes but the most recent was a reference to extreme far right content. Turns out the kid in question’s older brother had been radicalised. It’s important to call it out because kids will look up jokes they’re not in on
My kids are in elementary school and I don’t care if they listen to Katy Perry. They listen to radio edits of some very explicit songs but otherwise they listen to the same music as the adults in the room.
In this specific letter, with the LW’s specific role, and this specific song I think saying something is worthwhile. I don’t think there is anything wrong with kids listening to Katy Perry, though.
When my niece was in sixth grade, the choir teacher chose the song “Someone That I Used to Know” by Gotye for the students to perform at their spring concert. Not the most inappropriate choice ever but certainly unusual.
I can see why they picked it though, for the singing style, it would sound really good.
I love that song. Not because of the subject matter, but it’s musically pleasing and I enjoy singing it.
I can’t imagine doing it in sixth grade choir, though!
I am as old as the hills and not aware of this song. But I know a classic RF when I see it. Some young person who knows the meme suggested it to the naive leader precisely to put one over on her. Stop this before it explodes in everyone’s face.
Old as the hills – so, 50, eh?
(If it makes the absolutely-not-old Gen Xers here feel better, I’m a young Millennial and the OP saying that parents in the audience would include “elder Zoomers” did give me a moment of pause.)
RF? Have not heard that term in a while, I’m old as dirt too :-)
My kids’ K-8 school once played a steel pan version of Blurred Lines. Even without the lyrics…still no!
“Pumped Up Kicks” used to be on the roster for every school event when my oldest was in kindergarten/first grade. I know they probably heard fun music, no swears, must be good to go, and didn’t really give the lyrics a good hard listen.
Wow…
I mean, Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” has been treated as flag-waving patriotism and played at right-wing political rallies, but “Pumped Up Kicks” puts the lyric “better run faster than my bullet” in the damn chorus.
I thought it was “better run faster than my boyfriend”. Was so confused.
It’s surprisingly common – my kid had a square dance performance to Pitbull and Kesha’s ‘Timber’, which is wildly inappropriate. But it had the right rhythm, so apparently I was just oversensitive…
I remember a teen concert where the instrumentalists played “Tequila” but the singers stood silently and didn’t sing the word itself as referencing alcohol was against the school’s standards.
I was like “Come on! Everyone is filling in the word mentally! They know it’s about drinking!”
I (a cat lady not quite in her fifties) once had to advise a mom whose daughter was in one of those tot dance troupes–which creep me out, anyway–that they shouldn’t use Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop”, because I was around in the 80s and knew the words.
In general, I don’t believe in worrying too much about the music kids are listening to – the stuff that’s not appropriate for them will go over their heads anyway. I do think this situation is different though, because of the risk of what they will find if they google the song, so worth speaking up.
There is–I am not joking–a Kids Bop version of WAP.
“WAP (Wings And Pizza)” featuring Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion. (Fully SFW.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RmnpAu9ipE
My favourite version is the filk “Well-Armed Peasants”
While Kidz Bop has done some insane covers, I’m afraid that one isn’t actually theirs, but is instead a parody version by an adult who credited herself as “Lardi B.”
One way to tell it’s not actually Kidz Bop, beyond “that rapper does not sound pre-pubescent,” is that Kidz Bop’s lyrical changes are almost always a whole lot clumsier and less coherent. They don’t typically rewrite whole songs to be about something more kid-friendly, but instead change just the words or phrases they decided were too child-inappropriate. Kidz Bop changes lyrics roughly the same way that network TV used to edit R-rated movies (often with similarly funny – but not exactly *intentionally* funny – results).
And sometimes adults just don’t know.
A children’s puppet theater needed to rebrand and the puppeteers (4 adults in mid 50-60s range) wanted to play on the aspect of what happens behind the scenes/curtain.
They announced in a meeting the new name would be “Behind the Green Door Puppet Theater”. A few people gasped and someone else exclaimed “Isn’t that a porno?”. Yes friends, BtGD was a porn flick from the early 70’s. This was around 2010, and they had never heard of it. But the fact that some people in the meeting had heard of it took it completely off the table.
OP 1 needs to mention it.
I’m a bit shocked at the number of really young kids who know every word of Chappell Roan’s songs. I’m a huge fan of Chappell, but her lyrics are pretty explicit!
while i absolutely agree, but also my friend’s 4 y/o loves “hot to go” because his name is otto, and he gleefully yells “SHE SPELLS MY NAME!” it’s classic
My kiddo and her whole preschool were obsessed with “Pink Pony Club.” Luckily no real explicit lyrics in there although it was very funny to see my 4 year old belt out “GOD what have you DONE you’re a PINK PONY GIRL” — she had no idea it was about a gay club and thought the mom just missed her daughter who had moved away.
Surprised no one has brought up Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Choirs, whether school or church, love this song, and I just pound my head against a wall every time.
I feel like using Camel to Camel to talk about lack of parental awareness isn’t really fair – because there’s nothing really wrong with the song or lyrics itself. Lots of parents would have actually grown up with the song as a distant, forgettable memory because it’s that sort of age. It’s just in the last couple of years that it’s suddenly been hijacked by internet culture, and it’s that new association that’s the problem.
It’s actually a little sad to me. It’s suddenly garnered all this attention not for anything the songwriters would have wanted, but because of a meme that broke containment.
Yeah, I hope LW frames this to her colleague as, “Hey, the song is being used in an explicit meme that went viral, we should probably pick a different tune,” as opposed to implying that the song itself is the problem/colleague should have known better than to go along with the suggestion. Not everyone is super online (regardless of whether they’re GenX, Elder Millennials, or Gen Z).
I had a similar experience about ten(?) years ago when I attended my son’s elementary music performance. I was pretty surprised when they sang “I Believe I Can Fly” and mentioned that after the concert when another mom and I were chatting with the music teacher. She was confused and asked why so I said, “Um… because of the pedophilia…” very awkwardly trying to find a way to explain in a crowd of children and parents. I don’t get it, music teachers took way too long to catch up with the R. Kelly accusations.
But in that case, the issue is with the singer, not the lyrics themselves. The song itself is actually pretty hopeful, and it was written for a kid-friendly movie. It’s just the artist turned out to be scum. And yes, that can be enough (I have at LEAST 4 songs I have sung socially and/or to my kids whose lyrics were written by Goddamn Neil Gaiman, so I am dropping them from my repertoire) but it’s not the same as accidentally teaching kids a song about heroin or rape.
OMG, yes to this! We’ve heard Macarena at events for kids at my job. Holy problematic.
Yep, I hope LW1 speaks up about that song. I already suspected the adult meme, but when I searched “Camel by Camel” it was obvious what she means. The song itself is fine, I only know lewd versions of the meme, but there is always more
#5 she could just be someone with warped ideas about normal workplace conduct but I agree with Alison to look at this one more closely. If she’s deliberately working late after being told not to and lying about why, I’d wonder if there’s bad things she’s doing with workplace info/resources she’s trying to hide by doing it when there’s a lot less people around and her time isn’t being tracked
Eh, it’s also possible that she’s taken home the wrong message (perhaps from the ex supervisor) that the individual BOSS will be in trouble if they know about it, and that what’s needed is plausible deniability. If she thinks she’s doing you a solid by giving you the lies, the question bifurcates:
1. is this a lagging problem from the ex-supervisor? If so, what other misconceptions that they sowed, are still bearing rotten fruit?
2. is this employee given to “2+2=22” thinking, more generally? (That’s distinct from, “do they usually screw up and lie to cover it up.”)
Also, make sure your language can’t feed into the misconception that the problem involves “knowing about it.” The company is on the hook, and all of you are on the hook, from the moment it happens. Hiding, lying, intending to fix it later? None of that can fix the problem.
You need to know who suggested otherwise, and why the employee is taking their advice, over your direction.
This is exactly what I was thinking, but couldn’t articulate it. (I think) Pam feels she is doing the company / the team / LW a favor by doing these extra hours (are they beneficial due to workload?) and when “caught” she’s providing LW with a plausible deniability excuse so that if questioned later LW would be able to say “Pam informed me that she had addressed this with payroll” etc. Perhaps Pam doesn’t expect LW to genuinely believe it, as presumably Pam knows that LW knows how time sheet corrections work etc, but it is a shared “fiction” in Pam’s mind.
Yeah, I’m salaried, but have a coworker who used to work completely unsustainable levels of overtime because she convinced herself she had to. All she ended up doing was concealing the fact that we were impossibly understaffed from the powers that be, until she suddenly had a breakdown from the strain. Now she’s part time.
Unrecorded overtime is always bad. If it isn’t illegal, it’s unsustainable, and the instant the person who’s doing it stops being able to sustain it, bad things happen.
I think an employee who was working under a “plausible deniability” misconception would just stick to lying by omission. The fact that they’ve very comfortably segued into bold face lying is pretty alarming. Once a manager starts grilling you for details about something you thought they didn’t want to know about, you would ask them if they really wanted to know about volunteered overtime, what their “real” problem is, how they’d like you to do things differently, or you’d say “I understand you’d have to explain seeing me here when it’s not logged, so you won’t *see* me here when you tell me you’re staying late (wink, wink).” The making stuff up out of thin air shows very disorganised thinking (I like your no. 2 example) which probably is linked to a nest of other problems, regardless of whether or not it’s malicious.
I think it is worth looking into whether this was something taught/encouraged by the previous manager. It is such an odd thing to work unpaid overtime and then tell outright lies about it that it makes me think that she was told to do it.
This employee lied to a manager, she needs to be fired.
They also need to fill that manager position, ASAP. When the cat is away, the mice will play. Who knows what else this employee (or others) are up to while they have only a part-time floater managing them.
It’s an extreme case, but years ago when I worked retail my chain sent out constant“ employees are not allowed behind the counter if they are not on the clock” reminders, as well as constant stuff about how to count the cash drawers. We all wondered why they were beating this issue to death.
It turns out that an employee at one store was stealing cash from the drawers. What made her harder to catch is that she lived nearby and would come in to the store on days off or before/after her shifts and work to “help out” so thefts were happening when she was not on the schedule.
Why the company dealt with this via company-wide memos and articles in the newsletter vs: tackling it head on with the problem employee is because of bad upper management and bad local management, the manager of the store had left and the duties were divided among a couple temporary managers from other stores. This person was given like 25-30 warnings with no consequences, and stole thousands of dollars.
That was one of the possibilities that crossed my mind… if she is lying like this what else really bad is she up to?
It could be less about the previous manager than vocational awe or the need to feel essential. I’ve dealt with both. Having to tell employees that they cannot volunteer their time sometimes gets seen as not being fully on board with the mission.
I tried dealing with this nicely. Then I had to bluntly tell someone that I wasn’t going to jail for payroll fraud. I had to pay her for time worked and I wasn’t going to jeopardize the organization, mine, and the business manager’s future because she wouldn’t stop working. Next time it happened it would be a fire able offense.
Yeah that was my thought. I worked in a field that attracted a lot of people who would get overinvested. I thought of several people I used to know when reading this. They would clock out so that they wouldn’t have any recorded overtime and then go back to work. Management would discourage them and then just give up on stopping them because they were already too understaffed to be able to lose them. I’m glad I’m in a different field now.
Could it be possible she doesn’t want to go home?
If so, that’s really not the manager’s problem to solve.
This was my first thought. I used to work with someone who worked extremely long hours, without being paid overtime, and was told to stop. They did end up stopping with work but was found in the parking lot sleeping in their car before and after work. They were definitely not homeless. Came to find out later that the person had a very bad homelife and was avoiding going home.
Yeah I’ve worked with hourly people who stayed late off the clock and it was mostly because the workload was unsustainable but the boss’s response was “get it done no matter what,” and they looked the other way when they didn’t leave on time. (Or didn’t notice because their office wasn’t in view of this person’s desk, or the boss left on time.) but in each case there was more of a “oh, sorry, I was just caught up on X and didn’t want to leave in the middle,” or some other sort of excuse/apology like “I came in late this morning” or “I have to leave early tomorrow” so I’m making up time. Never outright “no I didn’t do that” type lying. That’s what makes this bizarre and concerning.
it’s also possible that she’s taken home the wrong message (perhaps from the ex supervisor)
This is *also* something that the LW needs to look at *very* carefully. Because SOMETHING is off here. And it’s not likely that this particular thing is the only problem. Far more likely is that it’s a symptom of *something*. And the question is what.
There are two strong possibilities. One is that there is a more significant issue with the employee – judgement, integrity, or ability to get her work done. The other strong possibility is that there was a significant problem with the (former) manager. And that could mean that many other things are messed up there that someone probably needs to deal with.
Of course, it’s possible that both things are true.
is this employee given to “2+2=22” thinking, more generally?
That’s a good question, and one the LW should definitely look at.
I had a coworker who worked extreme hours. Would stay very late and even come in on the weekend. He wasn’t hourly though. Our boss told him not to do it anymore and kept an eye on him but coworker just got more sneaky. Like scheduling the emails he wrote on sunday to be send on monday morning. I think he was an extreme workaholic and didn’t have anything but work in his live.
I have a coworker like this. He is just ramping up back to a normal, healthy workload after a year of absence due to severe burnout.
We (not in the US) are not hourly but must record our working hours to document we are within legal limits.
The main possibility that came to my mind is that she may be struggling to work as quickly as others during the work day, and is working unreported overtime to keep up with others so that she doesn’t get fired.
I once managed someone who worked unreported, unauthorized overtime, and as best as I could ever figure out she did it because she couldn’t meet deadlines due to a combination of her being slow in general and the fact that she was constantly interrupted by personal phone calls.( There was a “butt in seat” component to her job so she couldn’t just clock out for an hour or two to account for her time on the phone)
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Procrastinates during the day, has to make it up after hours.
It needn’t be intentional procrastinating, even—she could have focus issues that are preventing efficient work during the day because of executive dysfunction and/or distractions. That’s why I worked illegal overtime for years as a young person (never solved it, I’m just salaried now!).
Now, the flagrant lying suggests that it’s probably NOT that, in this case, but the dynamic isn’t uncommon.
I’d guess it’s the warped ideas one.
I remember a really embarrasing conversation about how I was handling overtime incorrectly. I was probably 5 or 6 years into my career, but my first manager had given me totally incorrect instructions and I’d been doing it that way ever since.
I’d bet some manager, maybe at a previous job, told her this is how she should handle overtime. Right down the the lying.
I work for a state university. For many old-school staff, Pam’s actions are expected and even praised. I have had to reset expectations around this with staff who are nearing retirement (and those they’ve trained) to make it clear this isn’t how it should be. In addition, as a youth in the workforce, I used to think I was doing my organization a favor and proving my value to the company by donating my time in a similar way. When my supervisor approached me about it, I responded with “I don’t mind, it’s fine with me!”
I suspect Pam doesn’t think she’s doing anything bad, but because the boss is speaking up, she doesn’t want to admit what she’s doing.
Regardless of the motivations, I think Alison’s advice is spot-on. In practice, I’ve made the point that the organization is required to pay for all work hours, OT included. Because I’m signing off on their timesheet of reported hours, if they later come back to claim the unpaid wages, it’s my job that is at risk. I tell them that my job is worth more to me than whatever goodwill they think they’re creating and it’s not doing anyone a favor to donate time and hide it. That framing seems to do the trick, and I haven’t had issues with anyone misrepresenting their time since.
I did this early in my career in my non-exempt role. No one explained to me that it was illegal (and in fact the execs I was working with probably were fuzzy on that as well), and I thought I was just being a hard worker!
I have managed a few people who with Pam tendencies.
One Pam was very, very confused as to her job role, and felt extremely anxious asking questions during the work day. She worked outside of work hours to train herself up without distractions. I totally felt for her, so I changed her onboarding person to someone who was a better personality fit for her, made accommodations to her workspace, and extended her onboarding timeline. We had weekly check-in meetings after that, and the issue was solved.
Another Pam was very ambitious. She was pretty early in her career, and she was aiming for a promotion for an open role that was 2+ levels above her current level. She believed that working longer hours “for free” would get her the promo. She was an hourly employee, and I met with her to let her know the legal implications of her “free” overtime. She pretty much spiraled out from that point, and instead of just not working unauthorized overtime, her formerly great work went downhill fast.
And then, I had to terminate a Pam who was working crazy hours to play video games on company equipment. She was shocked that playing video games on company equipment was a breach of security, but the company security training was pretty comprehensive and specific about this. NVM the fact that security is a 101-level thing to learn in any university comp sci program….no sharing passwords, no badging someone else in, no compromising company infrastructure to play video games, no using messaging apps to plan wars & adding journalists to the chat, etc. etc.
To be fair, it wasn’t a 101 level course for me. Which was a shame because when I took my first security course, in my senior year, I fell in love and would absolutely have changed my major if I wasn’t a comp sci senior.
This is absolutely what I live by today and would say to anyone I worked with or mentored.
That said… in 1995 when I was the (not actually very senior) IT Manager in a small marketing company and responsible for all the company PCs and their security… I did indeed stay late or come in on weekends to play networked Doom, Doom II, and Descent on the company machines.
I installed from paid official media (nothing downloaded) and uninstalled after each session. Also very relevant: company owners were fine with this so long as I did the above. I offered them a chance to play and they laughingly declined, but one did stick around to watch for some.
In my next job, I was sometimes part of setting up tech roadshows at a software vendor, which meant hooking up laptops to immense screens and speakers. A colleague played Quake 2 and Half-Life on a 50-foot screen with concert-level speaker stacks. That was pretty awesome.
Anyway youngsters, definitely don’t do anything like that today. Us 50-somethings are far too old and innocent to cope.
Yeah. In my first job in the 90s I installed Quake (II I think) on my work machine. In this case it was from the dubious media my boss provided. Good times.
I’d wonder if there’s bad things she’s doing with workplace info/resources she’s trying to hide by doing it when there’s a lot less people around and her time isn’t being tracked
Definitely this.
We had a worker in a special library who worked extra hours. It was this – he was stealing rare things from the collection to sell. Now everyone is banned from even being in the building during certain hours, unless it is a special event, and when things are retrieved from the stacks, two people must go.
Otherwise, this person’s work was good, so it took a while to discover what he was doing. No one suspected.
I think the British Museum had a case like that recently too… it sucks when people take advantage of trust.
I have a coworker who (last I noticed) worked unpaid overtime all the time. Her role used to be classified as exempt and was reclassified a couple of years ago to better reflect the job duties. The manager at the time told the team to ignore the reclassification and continue to work as if they were exempt, approving basically unlimited overtime.
The coworker perceived the reclassification as a demotion, and seems to believe a) her unpaid work proves her dedication and sense of responsibility, and b) our current manager’s insistence on accurate timekeeping is a targeted campaign to demean her. I really don’t understand this, since she’d be making a lot more money (and be a lot less stressed) if she would be more up front about her workload so we could share it more evenly.
She started being more covert about it when I pointed out that it was creating liability for the company. I’m not going to rat her out, but I am pretty worried about how we’re going to transition her work when she retires later this year. She’s hiding a lot of her workload so she doesn’t get caught, but someone (me) is going to have to pick up the slack when she’s gone.
“If she’s deliberately working late after being told not to and lying about why, I’d wonder if there’s bad things she’s doing with workplace info/resources she’s trying to hide by doing it when there’s a lot less people around and her time isn’t being tracked”
This was my first thought, as well. Someone who repeatedly keeps doing something they’ve been directly told to stop doing, and then lies wildly to try and hide what they are doing … they’ve got some reason why they are doing it that is not good. And when the thing they are doing is allowing them after-hours access to the workplace, or access at a time when there are fewer people around? Yeah, this is the tip of the iceberg.
Anytime I’ve worked around people who repeatedly worked unauthorized overtime, even after being told not to, they fell into a handful of categories:
– person knew they lagging or slacking off during their normal work hours and was trying cover it up.
– person was trying to increase their pay – though those people wanted to be paid
– person was up to something very shady that turned out to be a fireable offense when finally discovered: embezzlement, stealing inventory/company equipment, accessing data they had no business accessing (eg company customer contact lists), using the company as a drop location for fraudulently purchased goods, or front for a fraudulent business, using the company facility/equipment for a side hustle, etc etc.
The few exceptions I can think of involve people having affairs – either staying late for their hook ups or secretly sleeping at the office after their spouse kicked them out.
She could have an issue that interferes with getting work done. When I was on a certain medication for seizures, I often stayed long past my quitting time because I had zoned out during the day. I was there 10 or more hours just to accomplish what I should in 8. But I was up front with my boss about it. And I got the medication changed.
Or she may have an issue at home that makes it impossible to do various tasks there, like banking, looking for new places to live, corresponding with lawyers.
In any case, she needs to not be lying about why she’s there and what she’s doing.
@Alison ~ THANK YOU for this:
“Also, um, women in our fifties are not “innocent old ladies,” WTF.”
Seriously – wtf?!
I join in the WTF response. I’m a decade past my fifties and am still not old. I may never be old. And where did this impression start that people who have lived longer are delicate flowers sheltered from the world? LW1, the Coordinator may not know the issues with this song, but she probably knows and experienced things that will make you blush.
I was thinking about this after writing the response and was trying to decide: was there ever a time when older people were, as a group, more wholesome and innocent than people younger than them, or do all young people just wrongly assume that? Maybe it did apply to people who came of age before social mores changed in the 1960s … but that would still mean it hasn’t been accurate for any generation from the boomers onward. (And maybe it didn’t apply before then either, which is the part I’m curious about.)
Lots of wild stuff went down in the 1920s. If you wanna go a long way back, portions of the ancient Roman Empire 2000 years ago make us look reserved. While it might not have all filtered down to everyone in small towns, there’s always been a solid group of less wholesome people in every time.
I would agree. I’m also reminded of Miss Marple who was always very clear that while some things weren’t talked about, that didn’t mean they were not known about.
I alway like the short story where someone mentions ‘sex appeal’ around Miss Marple and acts apologetic. Then she clarifies she knows exactly what they’re talking about, but had a different phrase for it (‘having the come hither in your eye’ which is excellent!). She knows everything about human nature, that’s the point!
I literally re-read that short story on Kindle last night! (The Herb of Death, if anyone’s interested). Originally it’s from the Miss Marple collection The Thirteen Problems, but it also shows up in other Agatha Christie short story collections.
Bringing to mind the other Lord Peter Dowager Dutchess (of Medway, on finding that her new lady’s maid, who has dressed and undressed her for the better part of a month, was a disguised, young, male sneak thief):
“The grim old mouth relaxed a little.
‘After all,’ said the dowager duchess, with the delightful consciousness that she was going to shock her daughter-in-law, ‘there are very few women of my age who could make the same boast. It seems that we die as we have lived, my dear.'”
There’s another Agatha Christie, Three-Act Tragedy where a middle-aged actress says that if she wrote her memoirs detailing all her affairs, a character in her 20s, “wouldn’t like it at all. She’d be shocked. Her mother wouldn’t be shocked at all. You can’t really shock a sweet mid-Victorian. They say so little, but they always think the worst.” So the idea that young people are horrified at the idea of older people having had sex/done drugs etc but that the older people really know more about all that than they do and are less shocked really, even if they are more discreet about it all…goes back a long way.
My grandmother was always surprised and confused by the notion that you can only go on dates with one person at a time. In her day you could go out with multiple people and no one would bat an eyelash (unless one asked you to make things exclusive, but that was NOT a first date thing).
When it came to marriage often you ended up marrying the one who didn’t come back in a box (1940’s).
And of course, the sheer amount of preemies…
I was boggled in my 20s when my grandmother was shacked up with a pair of beaux at the same time. Did NOT see that coming, and I had plenty of poly friends by then.
Re: “preemies”
It wasn’t until I started doing genealogical research that I learned that my great-grandmother was 6 months pregnant when she and my great-grandfather got married in 1923; she was also 6 years older than him.
Anyone who thinks women in their 50s are innocent just needs to spend 5 minutes on YouTube looking at clips from MTv back in the day.
I heard a saying many, many years (okay, 40 years) ago from a woman in her late 60’s:
“The first child is always premature.”
Red Reader, I think we need a novel about your grandma!
My grandparents regularly told the story of how they got together. They attended a church picnic where she accompanied her serious beaux (there’s a photo with her on his lap from that day!) and while she arrived with the other young man she left with my grandfather…
My Frightfully Respectable grandmother (born in the first decade of the 20th century) was shocked, SHOCKED, when she went in for a fitting for her wedding dress and found out that all the skirts had elastic front panels as a standard element.
My other grandmother would not have been at all shocked.
As for me, I’m in my 60s and have a much livelier past than most people would ever dream.
Yep, when you start looking into the old parish records etc there are so many instances where a couple gets married and then oh look, a lovely round nine months later they’re back having their suspiciously large newborn baby christened! People would delay the christening so the official records would make it look a bit more decent, or of course they’d say oh the baby arrived a couple of months earlier than they were expecting. Of course they didn’t really have the medical capability to tell exactly how far along a pregnancy was, so you could get away with it to some extent, and there were an awful lot of ‘wedding night babies’ where things didn’t quite properly add up, but everyone turned a blind eye as long as the parents were married by the time the baby was born.
My father has mentioned that when meeting my mom’s family, he was advised by an older uncle that the first baby can come any time after the wedding, and all other babies take 9 months.
“Everyone knows that aan enthusiatic young bride can achieve in 7 months what takes cows and countesses 9”
Research using birth can marraige records show that in England, between 15 and 20% of women were pregnant at the time they got married – some significantly so.
When my mother, aged about 12 in the mid 1950s, drew up a family tree for a school project, my grandmother had to very tactfully tell her to but only the year, not full date,of the various births and marriages.(at the time, my mother wasn’t aware of the length of a pregnancy and hadn’tdone the maths to work out why using the correct dates from the certificates she’d seen might be an issue)
According to the birth and marriage certificates, my great-grandparents first child was born after their wedding, albeit only by a few weeeks. Given that said child was born at home and that parents self-reported to the registry office the date of birth, that’s very much open to question.
Having talked to some of the plder family member as an adult, my mother says she is failry confident that the brides family were well aware of the situation, the grooms family however were given the tale of a private wedding and a premature child. This would have been in 1916, so a quick, private wedding was plausible.
Reading Noel Streatfeild’s early works – The Whicharts in particular, is also interesting (it’s a novel she wrote before wrinting ‘Ballet Shoes’ , which is a much more family friendly story with the same underlying basis of orphaned / abandoned children needing to support themselves ).
In the Whicharts, the children are all daughters of the same married man, by 3 of his mistresses, raised by a fourth former mistress. And there are definite, if oblique, references to r*pe, pregnancy scares and abortion, as well as under age drinking, drug use and homosexuality . Streatfeild was born in 1895 and was herself an actor when she first left home in her late teens.
My grandmother (born in 1906) once told me she was the only girl in her senior class who didn’t get pregnant before graduation. It was a tiny school and there were fewer than 10 other female students in her year, but she was the only who graduated (pregnant students had to drop out – she was incensed when her father (head of the school board) refused to let the class valedictorian graduate after she got pregnant).
A few years later, when she was working as a teacher and got engaged to my grandfather, many of the people in her small town were convinced she would get pregnant and quit before her June wedding (she didn’t). My oldest uncle was born 10 months after her wedding day.
Yes! My mother (born in ’56) always told me about dating vs. “going steady” growing up… and let’s just say it was a very outdated notion by the time I became a teenager and started dating (early to mid 00’s). “Going steady” was not a thing; you were expected to date one person, and if you were dating more than one person at a time, you were either a “cheater” or a worse derogatory term for a woman (though for men it was a “player” which some took as a complement).
It was considered a bad idea to “go steady” too young, even up to and through college! There’s lots of short “moral hygiene” films from Coronet other companies talking to teens about dating and such, and they all recommend group dates, dating several people, and not getting pinned or engaged until you’ve finished your education. These were made in Kansas and other midwestern states in the fifties, and wouldn’t have existed if adults weren’t concerned about kids trying to grow up and into adulthood too fast.
My grandmother — a sweet little old lady who was fond of gardening — was apparently something of a hellraiser. She was a nurse in WWII and a good looking young woman who considered those circumstances a target rich environment.
Despite the myths about “girls all married at 13”, a lot of past couples got engaged younger than we do now (still more like 16-20, not 13, though, and in lower classes, more likely to be on the older side), but where they could, saved up for a few years while still betrothed, as they could in theory both work. Then several of THOSE occasionally got married a bit earlier than planned, because if engaged with the family’s approval, it was unsurprising if they’d jumped the gun a bit. Victorian, Medieval, it didn’t change much.
This would also describe how one of my mom’s siblings got married, so it lasted well into the 1900s… and probably the 2000s in many areas.
Haha, yes, in the middle of reading Three-Act right now. Such a good bit.
As an aside, Noel Streatfeild’s father was a minister and later a bishop.
My mom is in her early 70s and I’m pushing 50. She had a much more…colorful…youth than I did. And we both swear like sailors (in appropriate contexts). Innocent middle aged or old ladies? Hardly.
In Sayer’s Gaudy Night (1935), Harriet Vane believes she can’t discuss the problem of the Shrewsbury “Poltergeist” with the elderly Miss Climpson because of the sexual nature of some of the texts and drawings. The narrator goes on to say that Vane does Climpson a disservice because Climpson has seen A LOT during her many years and wouldn’t be dismayed or surprised at all.
I adore Miss Climpson. It’s firmly established in the rest of the series that she knows a lot more than she lets on, and has had a pretty hard life.
I’d love to read more stores from Miss Climpson’s perspective! Although I’m SURE she wouldn’t want UNDUE ATTENTION (underlined 3 times, exclamation point!!)
Miss Climpson is such a badass! And yes, teaching in a women’s college isn’t going to shield anyone from youthful picadilloes, by a long shot.
Oh wait, wrong character–but she’s still a badass.
Ha yes, I thought of Miss Marple too.
There’s a bit in one of Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman mysteries where a man freaks out at someone having porn where the elderly grandmother of the family can see it, and as soon as he leaves the room the grandmother and Corinna look at each other and break out laughing, and the grandmother reminisces about harvest festivals when she was young.
I’ve always suspected that there are a lot more Nanny Oggs (from the Discworld books) out there than people think.
That takes us to the assumption that small towns were inherently more innocent than big cities, which I seriously doubt. Someone mentioned Miss Marple (and given that Agatha Christie spent a lot of her life in the english countryside, I assume she was writing from experience to some extent, even if exaggerated). And it’s common wisdom in my country that the biggest scandals used to happen in villages and were covered up.
Have you seen Midsomer murders?!
Or still are. I think the main difference is that people in villages and very small towns can’t avoid knowing each other. They may hate each other’s guts, but they still somehow have to deal with the fact that their nemesis exists in an environment where you can’t decide to be friendly strangers because everyone’s all up in everybody else’s business. I much prefer the relative anonymity of a city and find small towns oppressive.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories are a favorite for a reason, the small village’s a great place to set a story in. Although Poirot lives in a fairly central part of London, most of his cases are set elsewhere. Usually he has to travel either to a mansion somewhere in the country or internationally.
The same thing applies to, say, Avonlea, a lot of the charm of the books has to do with the characters and the way they interact. I love reading the stories but I’d hate to live in that time and place.
As much as I enjoy Midsomer Murders, the number of murders in those small communities around the fictional town of Causton is getting ridiculous.
Even Poirot’s non-village cases occur in small, tight communities such as expat enclaves or the upper social echelons.
Ditto Midsomer (it’s narrowed down to the rowing club or the planning committee).
there’s a nice in joke about the high level of crime in Midsomer – a new sergeant mentions it, and Barnaby says something like : it has been noted
For a time, PBS had a promo for Midsomer Murders that featured that ended with card that said
Midsomer Population 1,257 (or some number)
But the 57 quickly flipped to 56, then 55, then jumped to 53, etc etc, finally flipping down so fast you couldn’t even see the numbers, as scenes of murder after murder flashed on the screen
Jane Austen famously said that three or four families in a country village was the perfect number of characters for a book… And she might not have outright mentioned sex or anything but she live during the reign of George III and they were a very long way from sweet and innocent.
Good point!
Also, look at her work and some of her characters. Yeah, no innocence there at all!
There’s actually a lot of debate about a line that Mary Crawford says in Mansfield Park about “rears and vices” (talking about the navy) and whether that was an intentional joke about what sailors supposedly get up to at sea or not….
(She immediately denies that it was supposed to be a naughty pun, so imo, she knew exactly what she was saying.)
@dePizan
There’s actually a lot of debate about a line that Mary Crawford says in Mansfield Park about “rears and vices”
I’m surprised. It’s pretty obvious that she’s being deliberate here. The only question is whether it’s about what they do at sea or when back in home port. Both because of her character but also because of what else she says about her aunt, uncle and their circle.
The political cartoons of the time made that VERY clear.
It’s sort of like Hudson University in Law and Order/ SVU: NEVER let your kid go there!
Amanda Cross wrote something like this about Murder She Wrote. She said considering how many people get murdered in Jessica’s small town and wherever she goes, it’s a wonder anyone invites her anywhere.
There is a very fun book “How to Not Get Murdered in a Quaint English Village. It has Edward Gorey style artwork and I highly recommend!
Lit Hub has a similar article! It’s a riot:
https://crimereads.com/your-guide-to-not-getting-murdered-in-a-quaint-english-village/
“If anyone offers to show you a vat, say you need to get something from your car, then start the engine and run them over. The police understand this sort of thing. Tell them about the vat.”
The charming island of St Marie seems to have a very low crime rate overall, but a high chance that you will be murdered, in circumstances that suggest four suspects all of whom have alibis.
One of the long-running British shows had a bit where the main character received a flyer about moving to the charming English countryside, which intrigued his wife, and the detective inspector was like “Absolutely not. Sex cults and murders all the way down.”
*googles “Cabot Cove murder rate”*
To be fair, the Avonlea (and Blair Water, as I feel obliged to point out given my screen name) are geared towards 11-14 year old kids. So of course they are clean and wholesome.
Why anyone lives in the God-abandoned vicinity of Badger’s Drift at this point is up for debate. Same for all the rich people who live in DC Universe cities. You can afford to live literally anywhere else!
Going very dark here, but the Pelicot case in France was in Mazan, a town of under 7000 inhabitants.
Keeping one’s “kinky stuff” on the down-low is business-as-usual in small towns, and absolutely can provide cover for abuses to flourish. (I’m including the link because I welcome a second glance to decide if this is, or is not, the place to bring this up.)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gisele-pelicot-men-accused-rape-1.7324328
There’s a great quote from Miss Marple in the book A Caribbean Mystery (first published in the mid 1960s) where she thinks to herself “‘Sex” as a word had not been mentioned in Miss Marple’s young days; but there had been plenty of it – not talked about so much – but enjoyed far more than nowadays, or so it seemed to her. Though usually labelled Sin, she couldn’t help feeling that was preferable to what it seemed to be nowadays – a kind of Duty.”
Father Brown (in the original stories) also makes that point to Flambeau – a man whose job it is to listen to people confessing their wrongdoings probably isn’t unaware of sin (whatever form it takes – if memory serves he says this in response to Flambeau’s surprise that he knows about a certain mark used by thieves)
AHAHAHAHAAA
Small towns are where ALL the action is. There’s nothing else to do!
This is why history is gripping for so many people revisiting it as adults–apparently what you learned in school took out all the sex scandals.
Miss Manners 1.0 described this as the fervent belief that sex was invented on your own parents’ wedding night, but of course the full possibilities did not become apparent until you yourself came of age. When people thousands of years ago had worked out the variations. (There’s a humorous scene in one of Lindsey Davis’s Ancient Rome novels in which our hero is trying to do something he saw on a plate, as a way to keep things fresh, and his wife points out that one of them is going to laugh if they keep at this.)
Just look at those ANKLES, they were scandalous. But more seriously remember things like my father born 8 months after his parents’ wedding after WWI.
My uncle was born 11 months after grandpa was home on leave. :)
Apparently ALL of our older relatives knew. My uncle found out when grandpa died, and only left him money, because property should stay in the family. It did not go well.
Yep, my great-grandparents eloped when she was 17… and never celebrated their anniversary because my mom always said “people could count to 7 and 9 even in the early 1900s”
Examined a family tree, and discovered that these conservative (and much older than me) folks who met their partners at church were getting married 6-7 months before that first baby arrived. I would never have guessed from the apparent knowledge of sex they displayed while talking to young person me.
One of these was my grandfather, who did bring up the joy of sex with me after my grandmother died, when I was visiting with his toddler great grandchild, and: Nope. Do not need to have this conversation with you now, even though the presence of the great grandchild in a straight line of descent makes it clear everyone has figured out this sex thing.
Our family found out after my grandfather died that he and my grandmother had been lying about how long they’d been married, to hide the fact that my uncle was born 5 months after the wedding. They lied for almost 51 years! I’m sad that we didn’t get to celebrate their 50th anniversary.
And it all depends on what’s considered “wholesome” vs “slutty.” Ancient Rome, for example, had no problem venerating and displaying penises as works of art and worship, very openly so. But bare breasts, even during sex, were considered something you only paid a prostitute for, as well as sex during daylight hours.
My grandparents were pretty low key, but in the 1920s they knew people who did cocaine and of course most people in society were drinking illegal alcohol at least once in a while. I’ll also say that both of my grandmothers were stylish, active, rocked the fashions of the day and in their pictures my grandfathers both have the expression “wow, look at me the lucky guy!”
My grandma who died a couple of years ago at age 99 very much enjoyed watching Game of Thrones (she’d read the books). When someone asked whether she found the sex scenes too much her response was basically “I’ve lived a long time and seen a few things.” My grandma didn’t know much about memes but she wasn’t innocent (wholesome maybe).
I think an aspect of this letter is to tease apart the meme and the off-color aspects. It’s totally normal for someone in one silo to be completely unaware of a meme that is common in another silo. That usually means not that they are unaware of sex or drugs, but that they are unaware “third sidewalk crack” now has a NSFW meaning, and so the person trying to add it to the musical is perhaps not acting in good faith.
At one level this is people not wanting to use an endlessly expanding list of acronyms because they only have encountered the dirty version, and at another level it’s deciding you have to tell your dad that Pepe the Frog is not a good choice of frog avatar.
I think it’s similar to the safeguarding question seen here recently. *You* might be doing xyz innocently, but someone else wouldn’t be, so you have to draw the line some way short of what would actually probably be fine.
(to clarify: where children are concerned, leave no grey area)
This so much. Unless you’re very online or hang out in particular social media places you may not know all the memes especially if you’re not interested.
That doesn’t mean you don’t know about worldly things.
Also you don’t always say everything you know. I mean if the OP doesnt know this woman outside a professional context she may not know what level of worldly wisdom she has because some topics aren’t appropriate for work. I know a lot of dirty jokes but I don’t tell them in the office.
Yes, I think there are multiple issues at play here. First, does the LW think the teacher is an “innocent old lady” in terms of not knowing about sexual matters or “innocent” in the sense that she doesn’t know about the video ? Second, the LW is asking about a professional way to bring up the topic. That can be difficult in some situations. I remember my manager asking me and another coworker what a particular expression that a client used meant. He was our age and we certainly didn’t think he was unaware of sex – but we struggled very hard to figure out how to explain what being told to grab your ankles meant.
Well, 50s is not “old.” I think that’s rubbing people the wrong way.
I agree, it’s awkward to explain something like that to a coworker even if they’re a full adult you can assume would know about such things. You’re not supposed to talk about that stuff At Work.
When you’re six, 50 is old.
Yeah, it’s the word “old” combined with the idea that the parents would know about this since they are millennials or elder Gen Z that makes it seem like the LW is thinking of people in their 50s as innocent rather than just this particular woman. Who may well be!
After all, a person in her 50s could well have another 40 years in her life and…it doesn’t really make sense to consider somebody “old” for 40 years.
Second, the LW is asking about a professional way to bring up the topic. That can be difficult in some situations
True. But the first step is to think about people in reasonable and realistic terms. “Innocent old lady” does not qualify. It’s just so unlikely and it just complicates matters.
I think an aspect of this letter is to tease apart the meme and the off-color aspects.
Sure. But I think that what most of this thread is responding to is the phrase “innocent old lady”.
She’s *50*. That’s not an “old lady”. And at no age past 35 or so is it reasonable to assume that someone is “innocent” in that way! Not aware of a specific meme (or set of memes) is one thing. But overall “innocent” and likely to need her (metaphorical) smelling salts? Not at all!
This. I’m the same age as the woman described, and have never heard of this song, meme or video until now. But I HAVE heard of all three, plus sex, in general, thanks! I would certainly welcome a heads up but not in some “how do we break this to you, innocent flower?” way.
Yes, I don’t mean to pile on LW but they are in generation raised on “all impact, zero intent” and told to use a microscope until they find the offensive word/book/meme/song, etc and yet so many of them, IME, have no problem with or even recognition of, ageism.
As long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.
I once apologized to my boomer grandma for telling an off-color joke in her presence and she told me, “I’m pretty sure I’ve had more sex and done more drugs than you and your brother put together.” (My brother and I were both married and in our 30s, it’s not like she was saying this while we had limited life experience.)
This reminds me of the time when my coworkers in their 60’s were going on about all the drugs they’d done. My mouth was WIDE OPEN because you would never have guessed by what they were like now.
And their being coworkers gives you a different perspective on people, which makes me want to add the other point — someone you know as a kindergarten teacher may be seriously code-switching in a professional context!
Ha! At my mother-in-law’s assisted living facility, the med tech delivering her doses apologized for the number of pills she’d have to take all at once.
MIL gave her a Look and said, “You know, I came of age in the 60s.”
+1000.
“One pill, makes you larger, a-a-and one pill makes you small” I was too young to party in the 1960s, but I do recall seeing Jefferson Airplane sing that song live on The Today Show…
Ha. There was a time when I was probably the oldest person working for this small media-related company, and in the course of conversation something about mixing drugs came up and I said, “Yeah, that’s called a speedball.”
My boss gave me the eye and said, “how do you know that?”
I said, “Oh, I’m well-read.”
I’m in my 60s, my neighbors are in their 80s, and THEY have some stories of the 1960s. The woman was particularly widely travelled, she went all over Asia and now runs an import business. And yes they dropped acid.
Your comment makes this boomer want to meet your grandma. I’ll bet she has great stories.
I once read a post by a Boomer talking about how when she was a teen her grandma said something abut teens these days, the poster brought up the Roaring ’20s, and her grandma was like “good point!”
My dad, who is approaching 70, has been smoking pot for much longer than I’ve been alive and took a wild motorcycle trip across the country in his 20s. My mom, also nearing 70, has a tattoo on her, ahem, chest that she got in a bar when she was 18. Do I want to know more about my mom in a bar with her top down in the 70s? Not really! But it’s a good reminder that they had plenty of life experience before I came along.
My grandma once asked what a bumper sticker that said “it’s fine to wine, dine, and 69” meant. I was about 24 at the time, so she was in her late 60s. I was so embarrassed but told her in very stilted language. Her response? “Oh, your grandfather and I have been doing that since we were teenagers!”
I always snort laugh when people act like my sister is some innocent precious just because she is 70 . She was a teenager in the 60’s. She moved from NYC to rural PA at 15 and was kind of famous for introducing my somewhat sheltered high-school to much of what the decade had to offer. My teachers very much remembered her when I rolled through 15 years later.
This is an indie rom-com waiting to happen!
If you’re putting the most charitable interpretation on the use of the word “innocent” here, it could be that this OP was thinking they were innocent in relation to the meme and online culture in general. But unless you’ve led an incredibly sheltered life, by the time you’re that age, nothing about people really surprises you – even if you don’t know much about online culture.
Heck, my life was more sheltered than many, and for awhile I was a professional Christian (think a job in a church, something like that), so people assumed I knew much less than I do. Doesn’t mean I never went through middle school and high school, or never heard off-color jokes, never discussed these things with my friends…. It’s one of those things you’re going to learn about somewhere.
Yup, I mentioned below that when I was at college, we had the saucier bits of Chaucer explained to us by a 60 year old priest (this was around the turn of the millennium so he’d be in his 80s now if he were still alive). He was quite a formal kind of guy, but he clearly knew about all this and…didn’t disapprove.
My high school Classics teacher actually checked that we knew what sexual activity between two men involved before she embarked on teaching The Iliad! (This was at an all-girls’ school – and no, they didn’t teach us any Sappho.)
If you’re entirely unaware that men can have sex and fall in love with each other, many things in Ancient Greek and Roman literature will not make much sense to you, so that’s why she checked.
I defy you to find a Classicist who doesn’t have a dirty mind – there was the time my Latin class were reading Catullus on Lesbia ane her three hundred lovers and our wonderful middle aged teacher came in for the next lesson, said she’d been talking about it with the other Latin teacher and the best translation they could up with was ‘shagging’.
I think we all went bright red – we’d never suspected they might know the word, though really, why should any previous generation be more innocent? They’ve been around the block a few times by now, after all!!
I remember a hilarious story told by Diane Ackerman about meeting her future MIL for the first time and taking her to a film of The Canterbury Tales–she was a Proper Englishwoman of a Certain Age and taught music to every child in her small village and so on–only to realize it was the Pasolini film once they were seated.
She was mortified of course, but the lady merely chuckled and said “I don’t remember *my* Chaucer quite like that, dear!”
I don’t know for sure, but OP might be thinking of their own older relatives; I’m throwing it out there just in case this is helpful feedback for OP. Like, just because your own grandparents/parents/aunts and uncles don’t get explicit about sex, doesn’t mean they’re not familiar with it. Not realising that, or appearing to only have family relationships to draw on actually makes OP look sheltered. Also, there’s plenty of dirty references that older people would get, which OP possibly would not. How would OP want that to be treated in the reverse situation?
Those of us in our 60s and above are the ones who invented the idea of memes, and alt.sex existed on Usenet long before there was an Internet.
That’s right. I know of someone who had posted under her real name to an even more outrė sexuality-related usenet group. This one was heavily moderated, and when she got a professional job, one of the mods kindly deleted all the posts in her real name! Those were the days, lol*. (We’re in our mid-50s, btw)
*It’s possible rhe posts were archived elsewhere, but this was before the days when content got regularly scraped, and when server retention capacities were still small, and it was fortunately well before web-based indexers (like Dejanews or Google groups)
It’s true that we 50somethings did not grow up with electronic devices since birth, but we also live in this world. So I don’t think “innocent of online culture” is really a thing. Strikes me as being more about reaching a point of not giving a fluff about keeping up with slang and memes and all that.
It’s definitely true that a lot of us in the Millennial generation experienced older people in our lives not understanding or being scandalized by things we found normal to discuss or experience. My ex’s parents assumed he would figure sexuality out at marriage, not realizing that internet pornography was an option for him to learn from. My mother (in her 50s) forgets that gay people exist. So there’s some level of disconnect happening between generations.
You don’t seriously believe that’s a generational issue, do you?
That’s your mother, not the generation.
What on earth? My parents (in their 70s-80s) have known gay people (and pornography for that matter) for many years longer than I’ve been alive. Just like OP made, thats a big generalisation about middle-aged people that is not rooted in reality.
Yeah when my grandfather died 10 years ago we had to clear the house. We found a lot of etchings and some non work safe material in one particular bedroom cupboard as well as polaroids of Grandma in her birthday suit. Grandpa was 88 when he died and would be pushing a century now.
The type of media now differs but people haven’t changed much.
We started going through my father-in-law’s slides recently and found one of my MIL in a corset and her nurse’s cap and stockings. Did not need to see that….
My husband found lots of porn, home photos, and equipment (and photos with the equipment) when he was cleaning out his parents’ house.
Friends. Not only do you need a will, you need a trusted friend who will go into your house after you die and discard the box on the shelf in your closet. Nobody wants to see those photos of their parents. Nobody.
Seriously. Apparently a lot of single guys have that “clear out” friend who’s deputized to go over to their house and clear out the porn in case they’re ever incapacitated and their parents are coming to town. This should be a thing for everybody.
When I came out, both my parents immediately started telling me about their college and university best friends and flatmates who were gay. (Separate universities, before they met each other.) They were both perfectly comfortable having gay friends, they’d just … never mentioned that to me because background homophobia. So I grew up believing I didn’t know any gay people and that there were no gay teachers and that my parents had never known any gay people. Turns out we were bloody *everywhere* but Nobody Mentioned It In Front Of The Children.
My parents did this but with our *relatives.* I don’t think it was even a conscious “we can’t tell them that these two women are a couple” thing, they just apparently subconsciously avoided ever mentioning what the relationship was there. (We saw that branch of the family rarely enough that as a kid, all the grown-ups blended together in one vague mass, I didn’t know who was each other’s siblings vs partners unless told.)
That may be more the older generations in your particular community than the older generations at large.
I think some of the issue is more that every generation has a lot of stuff that’s fine for adults to know about (e.g. pornographic interpretations of songs) but not fine to let on to the kids that it’s sexual.
My parents only figured out when I was 17 that I already knew what pornography was: they tried to access a torrenting site that I had been using on a near-daily basis since I was 12, and found all the popups.
They’re also both incredibly homophobic, which is hilarious because all their kids and two of their niblings are queer. It’s not so much ‘forgetting gay people exist’ as ‘refusing to acknowledge that gay people exist’.
That’s your mother and maybe the community she grew up in, not Gen X in general.
Yeah, I’m agog here as an older gen xer. I can guarantee you I’ve had more casual sex than 99% of the millennials or gen zers I know. The 70s were ALL about “the zipless f–k” to quote erica jong and that’s the environment we were raised in. It was messy in many ways, and the gender and age power stuff could be truly effed up (the openness about sex meant that there were a lot of blurred lines about what was okay — e.g, dads would leer at their 15 year old babysitters, or people would have affairs with their teachers). But I grew up in Catholic school system and a middle class family. IME, millennials and younger are a LOT more anxious/ avoidant of sex. It comes with other backlash about feminism (trad wives, anyone?) and queer rights.
As someone in her 50s, I can assure you that that says more about your mother than people of our generation. Growing up in the 80s my parents had gay, poly, and trans friends. Both my spouse and I had close gay friends in college. There were plenty of at least semi-out gay celebrities and, on a darker note, we came of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I can’t imagine any of my peers “forgetting” non-straight people exist!
Gay people have, obviously, *always* existed. Back in the early/mid-20th century it was reasonably common for two women to live together as ‘companions’ – the polite fiction was that they were simply good friends, both spinsters, who lived together for companionship and to share the bills. Perhaps some were, but of course a lot of them were actually couples! And you’d have single men who’d have their own particular friends, you might even have two ‘bachelors’ sharing a flat or whatever, and I’m sure everyone would know what was going on but they’d keep up a polite ‘turn a blind eye’ attitude. That’s how Britain worked for much of the 20th century – all sorts going on below the surface but people keeping themselves to themselves and not bothering anyone, and in return everyone would turn a blind eye to the fact that Jane and Mary only had one bedroom in their flat and wasn’t it a bit of a squeeze for them both?
do you really think that people in their 50’s, aka “older people”, are oblivious to the existence of gay people?!
When my male cousin bought an apartment with his longterm boyfriend (now husband, but it wasn’t legal then) my grandmother, born in the 1920’s and in her 80’s at the time, was delighted to get the tour, and didn’t bat an eyelid at the fact there was only one bedroom with clearly 2 people living in it. She had died by the time of his wedding, but my dad, aunts and uncles were all there. They would have been in their 60’s and 70’s then, about 10 years ago.
I’m in my fifties now and can tell you that you have identified a mother issue, not a generational issue.
My mom is nearly 70 and had gay roommates when she was in her 20s and 30s. The first person I (a millennial) smoked pot with was an 80-year-old hippie in a wizard hat – I was only 20, but don’t worry, I was supervised by my aunt, in her 50s at the time.
The issue here is your mother, not people of her generation.
Well, internet pornography is a bad way to learn about sex in practice, but sexuality is far from learned solely in marriage.
And your mother is either from an exceedingly unusual culture, or in denial.
I just saw a study saying that boomers and Gen X have had more sexual partners than millennials or Zoomers, even after you adjust for the difference in time spent on the planet.
You wouldn’t know it if you were meeting me now, but this boomer at 67 could tell some salacious stories for sure. It’s been quite a while since those days, but I have no regrets and thinking about them still makes me smile. :)
I like Cynthia Heimel’s description: “The type of tryst that will bring a gleam to your eye when you’re tooling around the old-age home in your motorized wheelchair.”
For one thing, the concept of safe vs. unsafe sex didn’t really exist before HIV/AIDS. Discussion of “being safe” with sex mostly meant avoiding pregnancy.
STDs existed but just weren’t taken as seriously before the AIDS epidemic killed a bunch of people.
I am at the very end of the Boom and AIDS ( or GRID) as it was called then was identified in my senior year of high school. I am 100% certain my college years would have been very different if I had been a few years older. There were ways to keep from getting pregnant and treatments for other STDs but HIV was a death sentence then.
As a group, I doubt it; specific individuals who had lived sheltered lives, sure, but that applies to young people too.
I do think that older people as a group tend to be more, eh, discreet. Previous generations accepted that there were things you simply don’t talk about in polite society; and even though that has changed to some extent since the 1960s, an older person is more likely to be less upfront about their experiences. Not to mention that they might be cautious about being judged for going against the stereotype, same as younger people might tend to appear more uninhibited out of a desire to conform than anything genuine.
Yes I grew up in the 1980s and my great aunt who was born in 1930 lived with a female friend for many years. I’ve no idea if they were friends, partners or something in between. We never asked and she never talked about it. They were just Caroline and Mildred. She’d have considered the nature of their relationship to be private and would glare at anyone who wanted to discuss it.
Yep. I had a great aunt who “wore sensible shoes”. I just thought they meant she wore flat shoes.
Then I discovered it was pre-70s code.
Wait, what??
“women in sensible shoes” = lesbians
“very fond of musical theatre” = gay (athough I think earlier than the sensible shoes element , more late victorian, early edwardian
Yup, sensible shoes was the Subaru of the ’50s to ’70s or so. “Light in the loafers” was the male equivalent. I guess people spend a lot time staring at feet when sex comes up.
Each of these code phrases also genuinely has the more mainstream meaning; when Lloyd Alexander coined the phrase “The muse of fantasy wears sensible shoes”, it was not meant to imply the muse was a lesbian, it was meant to imply fantasy literature should be grounded in real things.
However, the existence of the more demure meaning meant you had cover if you said the secondary meaning in front of the wrong person. Same goes for “fond of musical theatre”, “friends of Dorothy”…
Ha, I remember being a little kid in the 80s and asking a family friend if the woman who lived with her was her “roommate.” She laughed and said “nope, we’re lesbians!” (Thankfully, my parents were cool about stuff like that because I thought this was a nationality and asked where it was. Thankfully, not in front of this couple. I was probably 7?)
My aunt was a very austere, reserved woman who didn’t particularly welcome personal questions. Her friend was slightly softer but formal. I’d never have dreamt of asking what they were to each other. I mean my aunt didn’t like talking about feelings or that type of thing. She got quite cross with the matron of the home she went into for asking how she identified because that was a private matter.
She was the person I went to for intellectual guidance not emotional support. She paid for my books at university and I loved her and her friend dearly.
I think you don’t have every conversation with everyone. Some people are better for some topics.
Yes, I grew up with a “list of things you didn’t talk about in polite society” that may have been the case with my Boomer mother, but are very much common topics that no one bats an eyelash at among my fellow Millennials. Sex is a big one. Sexuality. Infertility. Pregnancy (pregnancy implies sex). Either lack of religion, or religion that goes against the grain of what is “normal” in your community (ie: my mother attended a Methodist church at some points during her childhood rather than a Catholic one because the Methodist church was in walking distance. Cue clutching your pearls for the hardcore Catholics in the family/neighborhood). Abuse. Divorce. These were all “hush hush” topics. I remember a cousin going through a divorce and everyone refusing to acknowledge it was happening because it was a “personal matter.”
“We don’t talk about this in front of children” becomes “grandma doesn’t know about this” and some people never update their software!
I think this comment really nails it.
Nailed by Bamcheeks as per usual.
The topic has my mind in the gutter when I read comments like this.
You must be under 25, you degenerate.
Make a filthy meme of it, quick!
I think it might stem from the norm adults will often (naturally!) avoid taboo subjects, refrain from swearing, etc around young kids.
The kids grow up and learn about those things, but imagine their teachers and other adults who never make references to such things must be ignorant of them.
This gets applied to older people as a whole and takes a while to shake off while one is still new to adulthood. Some people apparently never manage to quite realize that their generation is not the first to invent the NSFW thing!
Absolutely. Another thing is that most kids are horrified by the idea that their parents have sex, and lots of them assume that the number of kids equals the number of PIV intercourse sessions the parents have engaged in (I know I did when I was about 8).
Some people never get past this attitude towards their parents having sex.
Funnily enough I had exactly this conversation with my teenagers yesterday, in the context of planning a road trip I would like to take with their father. Clarification: not a romp, just the practicalities of accommodation.
Teenagers are taught that all sex can easily result in pregnancy every time, so it’s no great leap for them to assume that there was no encounter without a pregnancy — until they engage brain.
My kid, age 9: Teenagers have sex. Grownups are too old.
Me: Nope.
Kid: Grownups have sex? You and Daddy have sex?
Me: Yup.
Kid: When was the last time?
Me: That’s private and we don’t discuss that.
pause
Kid: When’s the next time?
LOL!
You: “Nunya!”
I have a 10 year old, and while he’d never say this (He’s still in Princess Bride “Is this a *kissing* book?” mentality), I can absolutely see these questions coming from one of his classmates…
When I first heard about sex, from a school friend, aged 8, I assumed that it was something that was theoretically physically possible (like biting your own toenails) but not something that people actually did, more than once, for fun. Because it sounded horrific.
I didn’t realise it was a recreational activity until I passed puberty.
I remember when she was about 21, my older sister was talking to our 70ish grandma about staying sometimes at her fiance’s house (they both lived with their parents at the time) and then said something like, “But he sleeps on the couch when I’m there!” and I was so baffled about why she’d lie about that. At least three of her sons lived with girlfriends before marriage, she’s not going to be that easily shocked!
It’s about 20 years later and I think we’ve all realised now that our 92 year old grandma has probably seen a fair bit of life and even if she hasn’t heard of something before, she’s not going to be easy to surprise.
My mother insisted that I not tell my grandparents my BF and I were living together the summer after we graduated college. Pretty sure they figured it out when my grandfather called early one morning and BF answered the phone (back in the 80s – we shared a landline). Eventually it became clear that both of my grandparents had been, um, experienced at the time they were married in 1927.
Yes this. And then when they do, because it seems so out of context, it seems tremendously shocking to the young person. Like I still have a vivid memory of being 14/15 and my mum making a throwaway comment about finding Pat Cash (the former tennis player) attractive, and me just being utterly stunned she thought about anyone like that other than my dad. Obviously as an adult I can totally understand where she was coming from, but at the time it just felt so jarring and like the illusions were shattered!
I think it would be the other way round – if you hadn’t gone through the risks of multiple childbirths, you’re more likely to live to be old, but also more likely not just to have less experience of some things, but to have been less involved in frank discussions between married women.
I didn’t read the OP as saying that all old people were innocent, though – even now, long after you had to stay unmarried to have a career as a teacher, spending all day with infants who can’t have certain things mentioned and have to be spoken to in particular ways has very odd effects on some people. Sometimes it’s just a persona they forget to turn off, but sometimes it really does seem to become a habit of mind.
I’m just thinking about Golden Girls and how much action they were getting.
Especially when Rue McClanahan/Blanche was only 51 when the show started, and the other 3 were around 62-63.
Every generation thinks they invented sex (and every generation is wrong). They do often invent new ways to refer to it.
Or all the crafters going “teehee I embroidered a penis grandma would be scandalised!”
Honey there are 93 penises on the Bayeux Tapestry, 5 of which are human (the 88 others are equine). You’re not the first to do this by a long shot. And while we don’t know who embroidered them, it’s not out of the question that this was done by nuns somewhere.
For those who are wondering by the way: the biggest penis belongs to William the Conqueror’s horse. Raise your hand if you’re not surprised.
Oh, and all of the penises in Pompeii!
Not to mention all the phallic symbols found – still being found! – in Pompeii and Herculaneum. There’s a very rude mosaic at the entrance to one house where the various bathing implements are laid out to depict something extremely NSFW.
Haha, and all the ones in illuminated medieval manuscripts. They’re everywhere.
I think we make a lot of assumptions based on, well, for most of us the older/younger generations we’re closest to are family, and there are things we don’t talk about to family.
I am reminded of a conversation I once had with my father.
Me: …anyway, Kyosai was an artist who drew in a lot of very different styles…
Dad: The Japanese have some very strange art. What do they call those… with the tentacles…
Me: Hentai?
Dad: Yes, Hentai!
…
…
…MUTUAL CHANGE OF SUBJECT
I still hide behind the illusion that older generations are blissfully ignorant. I’m just wrong.
I have an even better story.
I was complaining about how my cousin kept looking up hentai on my grandmother’s computer and both polluting the search results such that when I was trying to use search the suggested results were all hentai related and also filling it with viruses. Made the mistake of actually using the word “hentai”. Dad said “what’s that?” and I told him he did not want to know and it was bad.
Then he yelled “ewwwww” a few minutes later. Apparently he googled it.
My grandma totally was innocent to such things, but that was my grandma not her generation (born late 1930s). I do think how we talked about things have shifted, and so I can see an intergenerational difference in that but probs not so great for generation of 50 year olds…
Today’s 50yos were born c.1975. I can assure you they’re as well exposed to sex drugs and rock&roll as the rest of us GenX.
It may make a difference whether “exposed” here means having “awareness of” or “firsthand experience of”. (But essentially, any generational generalisation comes with such a large error bound that it’s hard to prove any perceived difference reaches significance.)
I think it’s painfully obvious the LW is stating the woman is innocent about this specific matter.
It’s still gross to refer to a 50-year-old as an “old lady.”
No, it’s not. She’s *afraid to talk about it* with this woman. As if it will corrupt her assumed innocence. Plus, she’s calling a woman in her 50s old. OP is not speaking kindly or making a fair evaluation of this women AT ALL.
Certainly not “painfully obvious” that it’s limited to just this matter.
Funny how you’re willing to assume the best for an OP who assumes the worst about the director.
It’s only six years until I turn 50, and I don’t feel like a grown-up, let alone an ‘innocent old lady’! My mum is in her mid-70s and she doesn’t look or act anything like an ‘innocent old lady’. I think the days of ‘old women’ with their twinsets and pearls and permed grey hair went out with my grandparents, who would be well over 100 if they were still alive now.
But she’s failing to realize that the answer is no different than if she were talking to someone her exact same age about the problem. “What would you say if your boss were 25” is a very reasonable reaction!
no, it really isn’t. LW is worried about broaching the subject specifically because the woman is “old” and therefore” innocent” and would be unable to cope with hearing it. Otherwise there was no need for the descriptors “innocent” or “old”, or even “lady” really, the letter would have been “how can I tell the teacher that the music she has chosen is inappropriate”.
Growing up in the 60s and 70s in a fundamentalist area, I actually did think almost everyone waited till marriage. This is because the grown-ups *pretended* that’s how it was, and got all shocked at any indication otherwise.
The cultural revolution brought it all out in the open, which is a good thing. I still thought it all started in the 60s until I saw a documentary about the 1920s where they interviewed a woman who had been in her 20s then. She had grown up sheltered and innocent, and come to the big city as a young woman. She said the other young women would sleep with boys, and that was astounding to her at the time. So apparently has always been this way.
This thing of people not talking about it has allowed other people to believe what they want to believe. I really do think it’s better to be open and honest and deal with the real.
I think there might have been groups of people who wanted to appear as if they were more wholesome. My grandma was in that category – she clutches her pearls if any of us talk about anything that could destroy that image. She belonged to her towns fancy Gold Club and nobody ever saw her without her lipstick – appearances, including the appearance of propriety. For us, it definitely helped to create the idea that older people were different and more innocent than us. Add that to the comment someone else made in this thread about it being easy to conflate “they don’t talk about it in front of the kids” to “they don’t know about it” and I can see how the misconception can take hold.
fancy *golf club
I learned a new word today, “propriety.” Thanks for the education!
When I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in literature, I happened to spend a couple of semesters doing research into Colonial Era American publishing – this was a time period that most of us associate with the Puritans, social restraints, and general moralizing.
Sex guides and smut were very common publications, and were often extremely explicit – and published by many of the most respected/respectable names of the day.
Humans have been aggressively horny (and writing about it) since the beginning of history. Before we invented writing, we just told people about verbally, drew pictures, or made sculptures.
I read somewhere that all advances in communication (from the printing press to the internet) were made commercially viable by the production / purchase / consumption of porn, regardless of the intent of the inventor and regardless of associated benefits that accrued as a by-product. The money came from porn.
Yes, that is absolutely true. Common examples are: photography, film, video cassettes, and cable TV. Porn absolutely funded the early days of video and cable. In the early days of the internet, it was common for developers to go to porn sites and copy the source code because it was acknowledged that those sites were the most up to date technically (source code used to be available to view quite easily back then).
I think this was true right back to the printing press.
So rule 34 applies to all forms of human communication?
Victorians!
People assume they were very buttoned up. Nope. I read a book once about Victorian naughty stuff. There is a magazine online called The Pearl — don’t look it up at work.
Photography and film was invented in the late nineteenth century. Of course there were naughty pictures, and as soon as someone invented film, naughty movies.
Fun fact, a lot of rumours about corsets/tight-lacing is actually based on fetish magazines from the Victorian era. “My strict governess laced me so tight into my corset I passed out and she had to cut me out” was apparently not an uncommon fetish and those stories survived so much that people think they were common things to happen now.
My mother (b 1935) disabused me of that notion when I was 14. She said “Anyone who tells you that there wasn’t sex before marriage in my day is lying to you.” She also told me about the friends she knew who went to Cuba for abortions before Castro and the ones who were pregnant when they were married.
Mom was a stickler about language – there was no cursing in our house and we weren’t allowed to use the word “stupid” or say “shut up” – and an utter realist about what really mattered. I’ve always appreciated that.
My mom (born in 45) was the opposite. She frequently insisted that “nobody” in her school was doing any kind of sex or drugs. They didn’t have any pregnancies…
I asked my mom if she could remember any girls in her class who disappeared for a few months “visiting their relatives out of state” and she was silent for a while and never brought it up again.
No, there wasn’t. Venus of Schelklingen dated forty thousand years ago, sheesh. Humans have known about sex and bodies and probably drugs (see also: plants) since long before there were, uh, humans.
When I was 19 I went to an event with my grandma and her friends in one of her social clubs (I was the only person there under the age of 60, and most were in their late 70s to 90s) and let me tell you… the jokes they made! I was genuinely shocked!
But I think it’s because my grandma had always behaved around me like I was a kid up until that point and I didn’t have the frame of reference to think “oh grandma’s probably not like that around her friends”.
These would have been people who were born in the 1910s-1940s, so I think the sweet innocent grandma has always been a myth.
Some (maybe smaller) part of it is the temporary, generational nature of much “slang” language referring to taboo topics. Many of the terms Grandma used with her own peer group were replaced among the next generation of teens (who avoided discussing those topics cross-generationally); and so it goes. So now, as her peer group disappears, Grandma is left with ever-fewer opportunities to freely discuss those topics in mutually intelligible and stylistically informal terms. And it horrifies her descendants when she does so.
My dad and I have discussed this very topic! (Me: Fifty. Him: Seventy-nine.)
Long story short: To him, culture is a lot more frankly sexual than when he was younger and there’s quite a lot of stuff that was pretty niche when he was younger that is now mainstream and that many people did not know about or consider. He also feels that since sexual matters are such a large part of the culture now, this has increased the amount of importance that people give them in private life.
I think this is probably broadly true, just having grown up as a queer person. There’s stuff that was niche even among queer people when I was young that is now widely known, the topic of memes, etc. Fandom/shipping/yaoi subcultures also were extremely niche and are now a thing among straight people. In short, I have no trouble believing that people who grow up in different subcultures and different times have different degrees of knowledge about and interest in sexual culture stuff. (Not the same as “enjoying sex” – sexual culture is all the other stuff.)
I don’t think this translates to “innocence”, though, any more than it is “innocent” not to know or not to be interested in the finer points of any hobby/cultural thing. Mainly, I think we’re a culture that is very, very anxious about sex and Doing Sex Correctly, and that means that any time anyone isn’t, like, obsessively up on memes or deeply concerned about the latest trends in sexual behavior, we get all uncomfortable and start saying that they must be old or deprived or weird or “innocent”.
We always frame it as “it’s so great that we have to worry about some teenage volunteer suggesting a song for little kids to dance to because they maybe thought it would be hilarious to put little kids and porn together, and then we have to worry about whether parents are online enough to know about it and then we have to worry about how if there’s a video it will get shared among creeps on the internet, this is a sign that we are sophisticated and other generations who didn’t have to think about this stuff were extremely innocent little flowers” and I think that’s weird.
I was helping my mom clean out her mother’s correspondence a few years ago. We found some letters from one of grandma’s friends, written to her back in the 40s. Apparently the friend was having a torrid love affair and was telling grandma all about it. Grandma was definitely into hearing the details, judging by how many letters they wrote back and forth.
Grandma never uttered so much as the word “sex” around me, but I was also her grandkid. Even my mom was surprised, having never heard her mom say anything even slightly related to any of what was in the letters. So I could assume a lot of it has to do with what’s acceptable to discuss among age cohorts vs one’s descendants. Even once the grandkids are adults, at best there may be some coded language.
It may also be related to socioeconomic class. Grandma wasn’t quite upper crust but she was just brushing that category. How she wound up with such a crude granddaughter is probably something she still wonders from beyond the grave.
All old people have been young, and while the *specifcs* of what they know / experienced may change, I am not convinced that thery’ve ever been that much more unworldly Just maybe unmarried middle or upper class women where the norm was they stayed home and didn’t work outsie the home, but that’s a very small demographic.
Jut lookng overthe last centuary – the people who are now in their 70s and 80s were young in the 1960s, the generation before them lived through WW2 and the one before that, WW1.
I mean, at 18 my grandmother was in the Army, living in a Nissan hut with a load of other (mostly) young women from a wide range of backgorunds and outnumbered massively by (mostly) young men about to go to war.
I think the difference was that historically there were a lot more things that were not spoken about, or weren’t dsicussed openly, and that we are not familiar with the euphemisms that were used when they were discussed.
My parents are Silent Generation (both born during WWII) and are by no means innocent naifs. They were in their 20s during the 1960s, for heavens’ sakes! They weren’t wild hippies by any means but they have seen some shit.
was there ever a time when older people were, as a group, more wholesome and innocent than people younger than them, or do all young people just wrongly assume that?
I suggest you read some Agatha Christie. Particularly her Miss Marple series.
To those who are unfamiliar, Miss Marple is a “maiden lady of a certain age” living in rural England. People tend to assume that because she’s an old spinster, she must be naive, and some folks even try to “shield” her from “shocking” stuff. But she’s sharp as a tack and you pretty much cannot shock her. One of the running jokes in the all her stories is how she goes on about how naive all these young people are,
My mother (who, yep, came of age just before the 1960s social changes) was _absolutely_ more wholesome and innocent than I was. She never drank (her dad was an alcoholic, so it was A Thing), and married the first man she dated.
I…did not go that path.
I’m the flip side of that. I’m a Millennial, but while I tend to know about risque topics, I generally am on the straight and narrow: never had alcohol in my life, virgin, not a party person in general…
My mother as a teenager/early 20-something, in the late 60s/early 70s? Went down a very different path. Not that you’d know it from meeting her now, though! I knew from a fairly young age that she was wild as a youngster, but I keep learning new stories about her youthful escapades…
But she still probably knew at least that other people were, ah, not doing that.
I don’t think it ever was the case, but often, older generations are ignorant of what the latest teen slang words are regarding drugs, sex, etc. (I myself am in my late 40’s and I definitely am not hip to teenage slang.)
I’ve read the memoir of a family friend the age of my grandparents, and heard a few racy stories that were not in his book…he was definitely not an innocent angel as a young man in the 1940s!
Also, there’s quite a lot of songs from the 1920s-30s that are about sex and drugs…look up the song “Wacky Dust” by Ella Fitzgerald. It’s about cocaine. I think younger people assume older people were more “innocent” solely because they grew up hearing the older generations’ sanitized-for-children version of events.
Or “Viper,” about smoking the demon weed! “I’m the queen of everything…gotta get high before I swing…”
I think people have just always assumed that. You may be able to find individual people who are extremely sheltered, but by and large, adults of all ages know about sex, porn, drugs, etc. Maybe they don’t talk about it as openly, or simply don’t talk about it to you, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know.
FFS, this woman is in her 50s. She has seen sexual things before and isn’t going to get the vapors because someone is like, “this is used in a porny meme.” People who are older than you are not weird grey-haired babies.
Several holidays ago, my boyfriend’s mom was talking about when her kids were little and said to a few of us, “One time when Boyfriend’s Older Brother was a baby and he was finally napping for more than ten minutes at a time, Husband and I were on the couch. I thought about grabbing a condom but didn’t, and that’s why Boyfriend and his brother are so close in age.” Her teenage granddaughter was super uncomfortable hearing that, which I get, because who wants to talk to their relatives about sex? But none of the rest of us were shocked or surprised.
The one consistent thing about old people is that they were once young. I think most of it is the dynamic of our childlike regard for our parents and their desperate attempts to live up to that impossible standard.
I’m thinking of Nanny Ogg in Discworld. Doesn’t EVERYONE know a Nanny Ogg?
Anyone who thinks that the past was more innocent needs to listen to some of the blues and swing music from the 1920s-40s like Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry,” “I Didn’t Like it the First Time (the Spinach Song),” or “If I can’t sell it, I’ll keep sitting on it (the chair song).”
Warning, Shave Em Dry is definitely NSFW
“The Cuckoo’s Nest” dates at least to the 18th century and may be older.
The weirdest thing about the Cuckoo’s Next, at least the versions I learned, is that the entire song is a guy talking his would-be girl into sex, referring pretty obviously to her genitalia and his use thereof throughout, but the last verse, after she consents, they run and get *married* on the spot before they go to bed.
It’s like the cleanest dirty song I know.
I’ve had call out people who say things like, “she’s from a different generation.”
I’m a boomer who graduated high school in the 70s. I was more conservative, by choice, in my personal habits. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t experienced or aware.
As someone who has a background in historical research – no, not really. There are definitely people throughout history who have lived more sheltered lives than others, but it’s incredibly unfair to paint entire generations and genders as more “innocent” than others (whatever that means, especially since in this context innocence seems to be reliant on how chronically online someone is).
Also, it’s important to remember that assuming a level of “innocence/purity” in association with certain groups is behind a LOT of racist and classist harm perpetuated in the world, both historically and in the present day.
Not accordong to stories my grandmother tells… stuff from the 40s that makes ME blush, and I was raised online starting with ICQ. Also she’s the epitome of old school aristocratic southern lady in the best sense. So she tells these stories through the use of hilarious and clever turns of phrase, euphemism, and pregnant pauses. Its great.
Haha, yes. I know so many people who are incredibly raunchy and they’re in their 50s or 60s.
But, it’s very likely that she doesn’t happen to know this reference, since most people aren’t interested in sexualizing children or associating them with pornographic videos. So it’s kind to enlighten her.
I have been watching the Stephen Fry series Kingdom. Aunt Auriel and her care home friends are definitely not frail innocent flowers.
And I ‘m in my 50s, too. Not only have I heard about sex, but I am the generation that had safe sex spoken about to openly.
If you want context for a woman that age, compare it to having kids dance to “Mony, Mony” in the 80s. There were some additional lyrics that were commonly added.
I remember that, and it was a HUGE controversy, at least in sort of generic suburban culture. (Other huge controversies: “Sledgehammer” and “I Want Your Sex”, also Is Heavy Metal Satanic.) There was literally a column in the Chicago Tribune (by Mike Royko, maybe?) about how it was vulgar but people still needed to chill out. That was about teens and school dances, though, not little kids.
I don’t think there is an actual good comparison though, because all that was word of mouth, not the internet, and there were seldom visuals, and porn in general was so much less widely available – to kids and teens, of course, but also adults had to go to an actual store or order by mail, and it was considered a bit louche.
I do think, as a person who is fifty, that it would have been much, much more shocking to have five year olds doing a school routine to something popularly understood to be a sex joke than it would be now. We’d consider it inappropriate now, but at least in my suburb people would have been fired, maybe even if they had no idea what was going on.
There is apparently a massive issue with STDs in care homes because old people do enjoy themselves too and aren’t always careful about protection. I’ve a friend who does hair in one of the more upmarket homes in my area and she says you wouldn’t believe what some of them get up to, it’s like a constant series of bed hopping and partner swapping. People don’t expect this until they work there and then they find out.
The particular LOL may however be oblivious to the meme in question. And so innocent in that particular case. The situation reeks of someone trying to pull one over on her.
I, a woman in my 50s, am by no means sheltered, but I wasn’t aware of *that* video. I was curious but initially only found a mildly suggestive version of it. My 17-year-old was able to locate the real one for me quickly.
Cue my grandfather in his late 60’s giving my brother-in-law his best porno mag* and asking my sister and I (late teens) if we’d ever seen “a chocolate stick” while opening up to a certain page…
*Intentional Beastie Boys reference to help me cope with this memory
BLARRRRGH OH GOD
Yeah, uh, I’ve lived a long time, which means I’ve seen a lot of things. A LOT of things, you know?
I am also on Team WTF. What a bizarre and ignorant take on GenX women.
Yesssss
I think it’s really important to be mindful of this kind of thing. Ageism is rampant in the workplace, and “how else could this have been said?” is often a good question to ask.
Yup. I realized I’m extra careful to keep looking younger than I am (good genes, helped by hair dye and middle aged hormonal acne means Retin A is covered by insurance) because I watched management reject someone for a job because of her age, and that was 20 years ago.
And LW, looking like an “innocent old lady” may be useful for the teacher, help keep the kids in line because she looks like grandma. But you don’t know what she’s like outside the classroom. My great aunts looked like that, and my dad talks about how he struggled to eat he was laughing so much as they traded off telling dirty jokes.
I’m pretty careful to keep myself looking younger…. I dye my hair, and I, too, have excellent genes but 30 years of daily sunscreen, 365 days a year, and using retinol regularly, has also helped. I’m turning 50, but people assume I’m around 35 most of the time.
Part of me wishes I could just let it go, but my vanity gets in the way.
Not to mention, the assumption that we don’t know how to use technology, when I’ve encountered GenZ and GenAlpha who know less about using a standard computer than I do.
Exactly. Those of us that came of age in the 1980s and 90s were there when home computers first became a “thing”. We were there when it took half an hour to boot up and was in DOS. We were there when it took half an hour and 30 tasks just to get online with Netscape as a browser. We watched it get simpler and better and smaller and cheaper. We have zero reason to NOT be technologically inclined. It’s a cakewalk now compared to how it was.
My mom is 82. She has a degree in comp sci. She even knows cobol.
This idea that GenX is somehow technologically incompetent?
People, I networked my computer when you had to do all the settings manually. I word processed when you still had to use HTML style markup to make things bold. I did LAN games when you had to set up your own LAN. My “Geriatric Zoomer” kids can barely figure out how to save a file to a disk and manage printer settings.
Yes this!! Honestly people need to remember their history!! Jane Austen was writing about people getting up to all kinds of things!! The Roman Empire, check out a lot of religious very old paintings everywhere from England to China. Most hippies are in their 70s and 80s. Individuals may be sheltered depending on their background that said no generation is innocent as humans are humans
No substantive comments from me but I’m joining the chorus of WTFs. We may mellow a bit as we get older, but that doesn’t mean we suddenly become imbeciles. At best, it’s an ill-informed and uncharitable remark. Plus, anyone – of any age – can miss out on specific pop culture references simply by not being in the right place at the right time, and only someone who literally knows everything about everything gets to feel superior about it.
Yep. Millennial here and I’ve never even heard of this song and its attached meme history.
Yes, that made my morning!
Yes, a lot of the parents probably won’t be far off her age. I’m in my early-to-mid 40s and a lot of my friends have kids that age or a bit younger. Heck, my dad was 50 when my sister was born!
Alison: “and I took that personally!” Hahaha
Love the twitter thread linked
Yep. If someone is in their 50s now they were a teen in the 1980s and in their early 20s in the 1990s. That’s when E dropped. That’s demanding LGBT rights. That’s visible tats becoming a thing for women.
Also, search for “riot grrl”.
I was a teenager in the 80’s. I have never done drugs and have no tattoos, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t heard of stuff that you don’t want 5 year olds to see.
I have a young adult son who recently watched the movie Requiem for a Dream (about drug addicts and has some gross moments, for those who haven’t seen it) and was surprised that I had seen it when it was relatively new. I said, “Well, it was pretty critically acclaimed back then.”
Elder GenX here. Frank Zappa may have ruffled feathers by singing about sex & other taboo topics, but do remember that Tom Lehrer sang “I Got it from Agnes” in the days of black and white TV.
Prince. “Darling Nikki!”
I learned all the lyrics to that in high school and sang it to my somewhat horrified classmates and teachers. My mom had known Lehrer back in his Cambridge Junior League days and thought it was hilarious.
Be Prepared!
lol “riot grrl”. As a teen in the 90s, we were not “innocent” and we’re definitely not innocent old ladies…. also, have you seen some women in their 50s? They walk around looking fabulous and men still find them desirable. It’s possible that this specific woman comes across this way, but still….. LW should not assume she’s some innocent old lady.
I assumed LW was describing this woman in particular, not all women of that specific age. And since LW knows this person, I’m inclined to believe LW’s assessment that she doesn’t have the demeanor of someone who’d be easy to talk to about sex/porn in this context. Not saying that’s necessarily true (people can be full of surprises, as folks have said), but I still think it’s valid to note if someone has that vibe.
idk, just kind of feels like people are jumping down their throat for something LW didn’t even explicitly say.
Yeah, I was thinking, maybe that particular woman is actually “sweet and innocent” (or at least the LW assumes so because, well, kindergarten teacher. Maybe her work persona is, at least!)
That would only explain part of the expression though, because she still wouldn’t be considered old by, like, a vast majority of people?
(Although I can somehow imagine somebody with a very “sweet old lady” style – like, I’ve met people in their 50s who were basically behaving and dressing like Blanche from Golden Girls. Who was also 53 when the show started! So, like, if the teacher is like that – yeeeah, I get where LW is coming from. If it’s just because she’s in her 50s, heck no.)
Are you sure Blanche is the example you intended to use?!
I think you mean Rose. Blanche definitely knew about racy topics!
Hah, yes, indeed!
I also read that as referring to this particular woman, not all women in that age group everywhere.
But I’m surprised by the many comments being themselves surprised by someone in their fifties – which could well be, like, 58 – being considered “old”.
In my experience, that’s almost entirely dependent on how old you are yourself; I’m 34 and I definitely remember thinking of people aged 50 as much older when I was 21 than I do now. I feel like the closer we get to a certain age, the younger, comparatively, that particular age seems.
And to a lesser degree, it seems to depend on the specific person, how they dress, how they act, what their general opinions seem to be, etc.
I clearly remember my grandma’s 70th birthday party and to me, barely 12, she seemed Old As Balls. Now my mum will turn 70 in two months and she’s anything but. Part of that certainly was, like I said, the fact that I was a child and this was my grandma with a big number, and part of that was that my grandma has always been… well, exactly how you envision a typical “grandma” prototype and my mum is Not That.
Eh, I mean, “middle-aged”, sure, maybe even “older”, but “old lady”? Pretty sure even in my twenties that would’ve been reserved to, like, retired people (which is usually in your late 60s here in Europe). At least, I’d never have included somebody who still works a regular job as an “old lady”!
Ah, that’s fair enough, I’d say!
Yeah- I also took “old lady” to mean she had a particular vibe, not that LW considers any woman in their 50s is inherently “old.”
But also I think 50s can be old? It just sort of depends on the person and their outlook/perspective. It’s all relative anyway.
Innocent is a questionable way to describe an adult, but yeah, alone, it’s plausibly to do with her personality as you say (and she’s definitely innocent of knowing about the meme) but it’s not said in the context of “Oh she seems a little sheltered” it’s paired directly with “old lady” which is just … bad. It honestly is the weirdest description of someone you’re working with. I think as soon as you start thinking of women in the workplace as any kind of “ladies” you’re not necessarily wrong, but you’re probably headed there. Then “old lady” is such a bad combination even without being tagged onto the word innocent. It’s the combination of all three words.
“Then “old lady” is such a bad combination even without being tagged onto the word innocent. It’s the combination of all three words.”
Plus explaining the joke of the meme with a grandma/grandchildren example, which adds another layer of “old and out of touch”
I am sure LW means well, but the wording is far from diplomatic.
And in this context, it’s pretty damn close to “she’s too old to do her job”!
She works in theatre, with young children and presumably manages volunteers who are teenagers and young adults. I don’t actually understand exactly what LW’s embarrassment is about telling her about this song, but I’m pretty sure she’s seen and heard worse.
Maybe it’s a cultural difference, but I’ve never known any of those words to be inherently negative/weird, even in combination? I do know that using the term “ladies” or calling someone a “lady” to their face can be sleezy (neckbeard-vibes), but that’s context-dependent. Where I come from, it’s not odd to describe a woman older than yourself as a lady, especially if you don’t have a name to use (e.g. “The lady at the store was helpful”).
Similar story with ‘innocent’- I could see there being a context where it’s being used in a sleezy/gross way, but that doesn’t seem to be the context here.
Anyway, my underlying point is more that sometimes I feel like the comments latch onto something a LW says in a way that feels extreme or almost negative for negativity’s sake. If you have constructive insight, that’s great (and to be fair it’s good to know so many people feel so strongly about this), but honestly all the “WTF”s feel overly dramatic.
I don’t think it’s that it’s gross or exactly rude. I think it’s more that it conjures up a picture of somebody over the age of 80 and really a stereotype of somebody that age. I hear “innocent old lady” and think of somebody 80+ sitting, smiling benignly as she does her knitting. I think most people in their 50s would not like to be described in such a way. Honestly, many people in their 80s might not either.
But “old lady” is a bad combination specifically for somebody who is in their 50s because…they are not an “old lady,” not because the word “lady” or “old” is inherently rude in itself.
And I kind of suspect that if the teacher had been a man, even if he were the sort of person who would not be aware of sexual references, the LW probably wouldn’t refer to him as an “innocent old gentleman” or an “innocent elderly gentleman.” I am not saying the LW is being sexist, at least not intentionally. It’s more that our language has some sexism built into it and there isn’t really an equivalent phrase. But it’s another reason to avoid it.
Women in their 50s are far more likely to be considered “old” than men of the same age and that’s for rather problematic reasons.
Agree 1000% and kind of taken aback at Alison’s response and the degree to which some comments are going. I’m reading a lot of assumptions made about…how LW must be making assumptions about a person they know IRL (and we don’t).
A response of “women in our fifties aren’t…” is that not blanket statement as much as we could read LW? Some are and some aren’t!
A caution about stereotyping, unintentional or not, would be appropriate. But, also very appropriate to extend LW the benefit to read them as describing that particular woman, and not assuming she paints 50+ women writ large. Who again, LW actually knows in person and we don’t.
+100000! My thoughts exactly!
But no fifty year old is “an old lady”, any more than a thirty year old is “a little girl”.
That’s a valid point about LW’s language and potential rudeness. I read LW as being quite young and this teacher gives them an “old lady” vibe or feels like a grandmother to them. Yes even then it’s unartful language, still, a *caution* on how we write about people is appropriate. Again, LW is the one who knows this person and we are not: why do we get the leeway to decide how LW’s word choice was informed and she does not?
Even granted that “old lady” was directly a rude description of this person, I still believe assuming the commentary was definitely about every woman of approximately her age is uncharitable. And well beyond the usual grace readers here have been chastised to receive other unartful LWs in the past.
I disagree- a little girl is a minor/pre-pubescent. That’s far more black and white than the relative concept of being old. Apples and vaguely apple-shaped oranges.
It’s obviously nonsense, but our culture does have this trope (idea? meme? recurring character?) of the innocent old grandmother who would be ever so scandalized and probably have a heart attack if she found out what you were up to.
It feels similar to the idea that small children are all pure innocent little angels. Which is equally stupid and wrong, but you still see it pop up from time to time, and people can definitely internalize that.
It’s obviously nonsense, but our culture does have this trope (idea? meme? recurring character?) of the innocent old grandmother who would be ever so scandalized and probably have a heart attack if she found out what you were up to.
Yes, but the trope is, as you say, obvious nonsense. And the LW is going to be a lot better off if they recognize that.
A fifty year old woman is likely to be closer in age to a kindergartener’s mother than their grandmother.
Heck, when my now-23-year-old son was a kindergartner, I was 53. (Yes, I did wait until the last possible minute to have children.)
that really depends. I’m a 48 year old pediatrician and at this point, I am closer in age to many of my patients’ grandparents than parents.
I’ll admit – I didn’t blink an eye until Allison said something. And then I remembered that I’m 40 – and not that far off! (Also far from innocent, and far from old.)
Tbf to LW, for some reason certain ages get stuck with certain stereotypes, and at some point “50” was one of those that got stuck with “old biddy close to retirement.” I think if they had really thought about it, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
My guess is that they’re young enough to think everyone middle aged are unaware and precious Luddites, and/or they’re actually way off about her age and she’s closer to 70s. (Not that making a stereotype out of 70 is better, but I’m curious what a 50yo looks like to LW…)
I… actually read this as a joke?!
Like, obviously a woman in her 50s isn’t an ‘innocent old lady’. I do often mistakes serious things for jokes and vice versa though. And I’m clearly in the minority here!
Ha, I also took it as a jokey phrase expressing the lw’s “how the heck to broach this topic” trepidation.
Yes, I may not bring up rude and sexual things to my elders because it’s disrespectful but not because they don’t know about it. probably know more than me about it
Dan Savage (sex columnist) gets calls often from people about their grandparents. Once I remember the caller saying “Meemaw is in her 70s!— I can’t talk to her about this.” And Savage pointed out that if she’s that age, she was a young adult in the 1970s. Those weren’t innocent times.
Dan himself is now in his 60s!
YES. WTF indeed!
I strongly suspect that the LW will cringe in the future when she reaches 50, thinking back how she referred to a woman in her fifties as an “innocent old lady”.
While it’s true that as we get older we are less up to date on current slang, memes, etc., we are HARDLY innocent. Also, my 78 year old father is up to date on so much as he watches a LOT o tiktok, and I watch almost none.
Exactly. I’m 61, and there is a big difference between innocent, and not being aware (or even caring about) of all the current slang/memes/music. I’m far from innocent, but except for the music I hear at the gym or on overhead speakers when I’m shopping, I have little knowledge and even less interest in current music.
As a woman in her 50s I absolutely snorted at the thought that I might be a rare and precious creature who does not understand The World. Do the younger generations not understand that we grew up as latchkey kids renting whatever movies we wanted from the local video store, using fake IDs to buy wine coolers, and trying to make out scrambled adult videos on late night cable?
Snickering with you from your first sentence on, Corrupted. I’m a woman well over 50 who was alive, a functioning adult, and an enthusiastic participant in what’s now known as The Sixties.
Today, frequently, I have to remind the younger folk in my family that my existence actually began long before the day they were born, and I wasn’t always over-50!
Sure, there are probably (likely!) things about contemporary culture that I don’t know—but give me a little credit here. “Innocent old lady” isn’t even in the ballpark!
I feel like the problem is that when teenagers start talking about sex and other taboo subjects, teachers *act* prudish and shocked and try to shut it down. In fact, “teacher introduces academic topic expecting to be able to have a normal conversation,” “class jumps to the dirtiest interpretation possible,” “teacher is surprised at the turn this has taken,” was a recurring feature of my junior high and high school experience.
For example, my English teacher (a woman in her 50s) once gave us a definition of Romanticism that included the phrase “spontaneous overflow of emotion.” I still remember the phrasing 25 years later, because the class immediately decided “spontaneous overflow” meant ejaculation, and the teacher had to work to regain control of the classroom amidst the hysterical laughter, dirty jokes flying around, and general talking out of turn.
If there was innocence, it was presumably not that she didn’t know what ejaculation was, but that she expected to be able to talk about a “spontaneous overflow” to a group of teenagers and *not* get the outcome she got. Especially since this kind of thing kept happening.
In fact, “teacher introduces academic topic expecting to be able to have a normal conversation,” “class jumps to the dirtiest interpretation possible,” “teacher is surprised at the turn this has taken,” was a recurring feature of my junior high and high school experience.
I think that is less that the teacher isn’t aware of sex and drugs and so on and more that those interpretations are often…kind of stretches and the teacher, being a mature adult, didn’t think of those interpretations with regard to something completely innocuous. I wouldn’t say the teacher is usually “acting prudish.” They are acting appropriately and making it clear that the students’ reaction is silly and their interpretation often way off.
Teachers aren’t shutting it down so much because it’s about sex as because it’s irrelevant and often actually incorrect and they want to keep the class discussion on topic. If kids kept interpreting everything as being about cats or computer games, teachers would shut those discussions down too.
I disagree, because they *also* shut it down when it wasn’t off-base or irrelevant. When we read “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” we were supposed to skip over the “made sweet moan” line. I’m sure the teacher knew that there were valid sexual interpretations of that line! But the teachers sure as heck didn’t want us talking about it or thinking about it.
Ditto when we talked about reproduction in biology class: we were allowed to talk about the sperm entering the egg, but absolutely *nothing* about how it got there–that got shut down asap when a student tried to bring it up.
And so on. I detected a strong streak of prudishness among my teachers.
Seriously, this 55+ year-old has read (and written) far more shocking fanfiction that would apparently cause OP to clutch their pearls.
Also, am I missing something or is the “porn” here just some sensuous hip-swaying? I haven’t exactly done a deep dive, but that’s all I’m seeing from a quick (less than 3 mins) google of this meme. Can someone set me straight? I mean, some of the tiktoks are quite spicy and ymmv, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what the kids are being asked to do, so I’m just wondering what the big deal may be?
Jimothy, that’s what I thought at first, too. My 17-year-old quickly hooked me up with the actual video.
The actual video is indeed porn- animated penetration and genitals are shown uncensored throughout. The camera angles and POV of the video is also graphic (many shots are done such that it feels like the viewer is also participating in the sexual acts).
My (non)arthritic old lady fingers are all a twitter upon my clutched pearls at all of this. My poor dusty lady cave can’t imagine what could possibly be going on with naughty videos. I shall comfort myself on my rocker.
Now ^that’s^ a double-entendre!
I was muttering similar things under my breath and reading that was a breath of fresh air.
Now, get off my lawn!
I know, that’s just WOW! I’m only late 40’s but innocent is just a joke, I was a kid in the 90’s in NYC: which meant clubbing and bar hopping at 15. It’s a riot, this generation has no clue how innocent they are. They don’t even know that all their fashion was ours first: and our moms’ before that. They think they invented jeans. And sex.
. . . I don’t want to say that Pam *is* doing something fraudish or embezzley, but I will observe that this is the kind of thing that people who are doing fraudish or embezzley things often do.
Yea… either Pam is up to nefarious things or Pam has some kind of huge issue where being overtime for free and lying about it seems like a good idea (bad home life? IDK!) – all a (grand?)manager can do is look into Pam’s work more closely, and make it clear to Pam that it’s fireable because it’s illegal to not pay someone for hours worked and if she’s routinely making the company violate the law they’ll have to let her go.
And if she denies it don’t get into a spiral arguing just say it can’t happen going forward.
And uh, fire her if it does probably? Seems potentially sad but still, no options if she won’t even admit it’s happening and talk about it.
So glad I’m not the only one whose brain went this way! I felt unfairly suspicious but also, I have seen how fraud can happen within an organisation and this would be making me want to pay more attention.
I did too, and posted about it below. I work in a financial office where we deal with attempted fraud at least a few times a year. But I think I would have wondered anyway.
… and donning the cloak of “innocent old lady in her 50s who just wants to be helpful and certainly would never get up to shenanigans.”
100%. I just commented something similar down below.
I’m not saying immediately treat Pam as if she’s embezzling but you should VERY MUCH investigate into what she’s doing as well as telling her to knock it off.
I used to work with a person who also worked a lot more overtime than she put on her timesheet. I happen to know that she was self-conscious about the fact that she did not use technology the rest of us used to do the same work. For instance, I might use a spreadsheet to get the sum of 60 items when she would use paper, pencil, and a calculator. With thousands of items to go through, the time really added up quickly. she did not feel confident using Excel and preferred to do it her own way, but she knew that it took many hours longer than it took anybody else. I think she didn’t want it to be so obvious because then management would probably force her to start learning to use new tools, such as Excel, which she greatly resisted.
I used to do it because I worked hourly at an organization that expected us to do too much work in too little time, and overtime was not allowed unless it was cleared beforehand, which my boss wouldn’t do. So it was work unpaid overtime, or don’t get the work done. The coworker lying about it when confronted is definitely sketchy, but there are plenty of reasons this can happen.
Loving the 2 birds 1 scone metaphor (as a northerner will have to change my pronunciation of scone so it works better – scone/phone rather than my usual scone/gone).
I think I’m liking feed 2 birds with 1 scone even better than the alternative I had heard before, which was, “water 2 gardens with one hose”. Contributed to me by an avid gardener who is on a mission to cleanse negative memes. (Working on ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘caliber’ and not sure where the “too twee” line falls.)
Ooh I like that one too, feeding all the birds, animals & lawns is infinitely better than killing them!
“Rule of thumb” is an innocent phrase. The connection to domestic violence is made up, its true origins are just in the idea that lots of things can be usefully approximated by comparing them with your thumb.
Ooo, sorry double posted, you beat me to it :B
Fun fact, in German we use “rule of thumb” (Daumenregel) as well, but more common is the term “rule of fist” (Faustregel).
I like “Pi mal Daumen” (pi times thumb) for estimating numbers.
… I’d questioned the “rule of thumb” one myself but as best I can tell on further digging it really has to do with trades/measurements/approximations – a lot of english measurement units are very human-based (inch = thumb, hands, feet, yard was originally the distance from a king’s nose to their thumb, etc) – so variable but easily available if you don’t have any formal equipment
I like the idea of thr king just being yanked by the nose into a fabric shop to measure up a few yards of fabric.
I’m a little disappointed that cubits have had no practical use since I stopped counting my age in single digits.
True that, but the word has been repurposed in computer science, with AFAIK the same pronunciation in the accents I know, as qubit (quantum bit).
But yeah, there’s nothing nefarious about “rule of thumb.”
I’ve used cubits for myself when I need to measure things relative to other things and didn’t have an actual ruler or anything.
But yeah, give a measurement in cubits and it’s not particularly useful.
In this case rule should be interpreted as “ruler” instead of “edit”
*edict not edit
An old mentor of mine used to say “catch two butterflies with one net and then let them go” which I thought was a lot nicer than killing birds even if it changes the meaning a bit.
I know about “rule of thumb” but what’s wrong with caliber?
Presumably the connection with firearms, although the “quality/importance” definition predates that usage.
Getting pedantic over calibre is such a bore…
Scone rhymes with gone; rhyming it with stone is a hypercorrection, not more southern or more proper.
Obviously language changes over time, but I still find scone/stone jarring enough that I can’t get behind the new phrase.
The scone/scone split has been around at least a century, so it’s probably time to get over it!
I’m still trying to come to terms with “chaise lounge.” :(
Scone rhymes with bone where I am.
I think most Americans rhyme scone with stone rather than gone. The first time I ever heard it rhyme with gone was from a chef on YouTube who lives in the north of England. John Kirkwood if you’re interested in some great recipes.
Yeah, if I hear scone rhyming with gone, I assume UK.
It’s bizarre to hear my natural accent (and the one overwhelmingly prevalent in both my current and past communities) described as “a hypercorrection.”
I first heard it pronounced in the UK (I think Oxford though? Definitely not the North, in any case!) – so it’ll always rhyme with “gone” for me!
my old landlady used to rhyme scone with prune… I guess there are all sorts!
Scone the place does rhyme with prune, but scone the comestible rhymes with gone.
Where we lived in England, it rhymed with bun.
Wow, really?! Where?
(… the obvious answer is Scunthorpe but I’m pretty sure they’re scone-like-bone.)
I’m English. If you are Devon or Cornwall bound you say Scone like it rhymes with stone. But if you’re proper Northern i.e. upwards of Southwest it’s Scone as in rhymes with gone.
It’s really not! Google the UK scone map. Hardcore scone-as-in-gone is Scotland and Northumbria. Hardcore scone-as-in-bone is Cheshire, Derbs, Nottinghamshire, West and South Yorkshire and Lincs. Nearly everywhere below Leicester is 50:50, with a slight preference for scone-as-in-bone in the SW and around London. It’s a *very* counterintuitive map that doesn’t really map on to any other isoglosses or linguistic features.
I’m an ex scouser now living in devon with a brixham born partner. Believe me, we have had numerous arguments over scone (gone) & scone (throne). We also have the same arguments at work between the devonshire people & northern settlers. That’s nice there’s a map but i’m living the experience & don’t even get me started on the grass & bath divide!
Or whether the jam or cream goes on first on said imaginary scowne/s’gone!
Thank you! Born in Doncaster to a very working class coal mining family, and always hugely annoyed that the scone-bone pronunciation is somehow seen as “posh and southern” by Those People from The Wrong Side of the Pennines. It doesn’t map onto the south or the middle class at all!
Hmmm that depends on how strong your Devonian or Cornish accent is! I’m from the Westcountry county that everyone always forgets in favour of ‘Devon and Cornwall’, but my accent is ‘posh southern English’, so in my world ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’. Never ‘stone’.
It’s definitely jam first and then cream, though.
Hurrah! I am jam first too (something my native Devonian friends & family strongly decry me for!).
Agree! Also you can’t tell the joke about the fastest cake in the world if you’re not pronouncing it s’gone :)
I’ve heard the saying updated to “feed 2 birds with 1 seed” which I like because it rhymes internally. And makes sense (I don’t feed scones to birds, but I feed them seeds).
If we’re getting that nitpicky, then how would one feed two birds with one seed at all? They’d just fight over it.
adult and baby birds?
I like it too except scones and any carbohydrates are terrible for birds and can lead to their premature death especially in cold winter locations – breads expand in their stomach and then they don’t get enough of the food they need to generate energy and warmth. Free two birds with one key? Feed two birds with healthy seed? I can’t really think of anything better at the moment
Feed two birds from one tree?
Feed two birds with one tree seems like it could work, right?
*brain starts singing “Partridge in a pear tree…”
Pronunciation aside, are scones a special kind of bread that isn’t bad for birds? Because if not, this phrase is still harmful.
How about “twofer?” We used to use this for our kids when a school project could also be used for Scouts or some other purpose.
They aren’t made of bread. Butter, flour, milk. So more like a large soft cookie variant. No idea if they are ok for birds, probably not.
Flour is a carbohydrate though so it’s still in the bread category, and milk and butter are also not great for them either
Reminds me of when I was teaching at a school outside of the US, and I started hearing Rihanna’s S&M song blaring down the halls every week. Turns out the dance teacher had let a group of kids use that song for the annual Mother’s Day performance, clearly not knowing what the lyrics meant. After a few of us mentioned it to the principal, they ended up using the karaoke version of the song for the performance…
How do you miss that?? “Sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me” is PERFECTLY clear in that song!
Even I, champion of “The lyrics of this song are ‘hum, hum de hum hum'” understand the lyrics of S&M. She enunciates very clearly.
The same way so many people choose/chose “Every Breath You Take” as a song to dance with their new spouse at their wedding.
Oh, my word. That’s almost as bad (in a different way) as “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” at a wedding.
Seriously? Yikes.
I read an interview with Sting where he expressed astonishment that anyone uses “Every Breath You Take” as a wedding song. He fully intended it to be about stalking.
The only time I saw that song used accurately was in a Miami Vice episode about a security guy who was installing new at the time tech to spy on people.
Ah yes, especially great when paired with that other romantic song by The Police, Roxanne!
Arms over his shoulders, slowly swaying, gazing lovingly into his eyes, and smiling wide while mouthing along to “Better Man”…
People also think ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ is a lovely upbeat song about young people having a wonderful time, so they choose that for wedding dances, and actually it’s about escaping an abusive relationship. See also: ‘Band of Gold’ – people think ‘oh, it’s about a wedding!’ but it’s a wedding where the couple sleep ‘in separate rooms’ on their honeymoon and all the bride has is a ‘band of gold’ by the end of it!
My mother used to play Young Hearts Run Free all the time when I was a child. I listened to the lyrics and worried about our home life. Of course I never spoke to her about it. On reflection, I am pretty sure she just liked good tunes to dance to…
Children DO listen to lyrics and wonder about them.
The teacher didn’t speak English!
At a school outside the US I worked at, where English was not the dominant language, the kids did their morning exercises to the version of the YMCA that included the lyrics “you can do whatever the f*** you feel,” which is also the first time I knew that version of the song existed. The song remained on the playlist until it rotated off according to the normal schedule.
I had a student turn in a project based on “They Not Like Us.” I didn’t know the song, but she was being weird about it, and it was winding the other students up, so I asked my resident teenager, who showed me the lyrics and explained the context. The student’s defense was that a dance group used an excerpt (just the chorus) in a performance, so she thought it was school -appropriate. When I followed up with the dance program director, she said it shouldn’t have been used, even a “clean” excerpt, because by school policy we don’t want to promote songs with content that is inappropriate for younger kids. So please do say something — not everyone follows all types of music or internet trends.
I don’t know what age you teach and that could change this conversation considerably.
You do know Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize, though, right?
While a Pulitzer Prize speaks to the depth and importance of Lamar’s work, I don’t think it has a bearing on whether it’s appropriate to be used in school without significant thought and sensitivity on the part of basically everyone involved in teaching to or from it.
I think it would be a huge mistake not to meet students where they are. Kendrick Lamar is the moment and his lyrics are powerful.
As long as they remove explicit language like a radio edit, I think Kendrick Lamar would be a fantastic discussion in schools and it would be a shame if a teacher turned this educational opportunity down.
This.
A diss track about his rival being a p-dophile isn’t appropriate for kids regardless of the artist’s credentials. It’s not like he won the Pulitzer for “Not Like Us.”
Like I said above, it does depend on the ages of the students.
If this is 6th grade or above, I think a classroom discussion on Not Like Us is fantastic classroom material. You are meeting the students where they are.
I was with you until you said sixth grade. That some has an explicit rating and most public schools don’t even play PG movies for kids below high school without sending home a permission slip for parents.
*song. Sorry. Haven’t had my coffee yet.
That’s fair, I should have been clearer that this discussion includes radio edits of the song.
Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show has a lot of material to discuss in English, history, or social studies classrooms. I think it would be really great if educators use relevant pieces like that in their classrooms.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a period of history where it is safe for teachers to engage with explicit materials in their classrooms, even if they’re working with censored versions. All it takes is one angry parent and one scandalized school board member to end a person’s career.
I think this varies by school district.
My kids school district does a really good job of incorporating relevant, modern material into their classrooms. There are no book bans, certainly not something as innocuous as Junie B. Jones.
My 4th grader is reading The Hunger Games for school.
That is the basis that I am using for these comments. Kendrick Lamar? Use the radio edit and discuss all day long.
Omg, 4th graders should NOT be reading THG for school!!! (I say this as someone who deeply close to that book in both professional and personal ways.) That is an explicit YA with adult themes and is targeted for ages 14+.
I write upper YA, and truly, that is wildly inappropriate for 4th graders.
Your 10 year old is reading a dystopian novel about the multiple violent ways children kill each other? I can see why Kendrick Lamar looks tame in comparison!
I guess we read ‘All quiet on the western front’ in 8th grade, but the teachers did a lot of work talking about the context ++ situation.
I’m glad you live somewhere safe. A lot of teachers and librarians don’t.
I’m also pretty hugely concerned about a teacher assigning The Hunger Games to a class of 9-10 year olds. There’s so much violence and political discussion that a lot of 9 year olds are not equipped to handle. As someone who was reading at a high level as a child, but was emotionally immature, I can see a lot of ways that could go wrong.
Not to date myself as a youngster, but my class read The Hunger Games (and we saw the movie in theaters) in 6th grade English. We didn’t discuss some of the more political topics, but we knew what violence was.
I don’t think you’re a teacher. No, no, no, no, no, and no some more. They banned Junie B Jones and you think we can get away with a classroom discussion of an inappropriate song with students as young as 11. No. Not if you’re interested in keeping your job.
Where was Junie B. Jones banned?
I don’t know about specific places, but according to the ALA’s website, it was on the ‘Top 100 Most Challenged Books’ list between 2000 and 2009. The reason given (direct quote from the 4/21/21 blog entry on Barbara Park) is:
‘Well, Junie B. is, wait for it, not a perfectly behaved child. She is loud and talks back to adults. She says words like “stupid” and “dumb”. She is mischievous and a little bit wild. She uses poor grammar. She can be rude and often a bit thoughtless. In other words, she is a five-year-old! ‘
Haters gonna hate.
This is one reason why, especially in these times of books *actually* getting banned, I really wish the ALA would distinguish “banned” from “challenged”. Anyone can challenge a book. That statistic includes libraries that went “lol nope” in reaction to some busybody filing a challenge form, a thing that is in no way a threat to the freedom to read.
Per Wikipedia
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000 to 2009.[2] Reasons cited are “poor social values taught by the books, and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness, bad spelling, and grammar.”[3]
Beverly Cleary must be giving them heart attacks.
My kids’ school librarian is playing to kids natural desire to stick it to adults. She says “this is a list of books that some adults don’t want you to read” which makes the kids read them more. Then the kids think they are doing an act of rebellion by reading.
So I am more familiar with schools, teachers, parents, and kids seeking out the banned books than actually thinking banned books are a good idea.
I think I am coming to this discussion from an entirely different perspective than a lot of other people. To circle all the way back, I wouldn’t blink at Kendrick Lamar in their classrooms in a few years. Actually, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a Lamar reference or 10.
Texass. But just fyi, Alabama banned a book because the author’s surname was Gay. Shows what they were looking for and how closely they looked at the books before banning them. (They took it back when the author appealed)
I question the idea that underage kids shouldn’t know what a pedophile is. Seems like this is an appropriate subject fro classroom discussion *because* they are young
They should know the warning signs that someone is dangerous to them. They do not need to be exposed to the concept through a song so flippant as NLU, which glorifies taunting your rivals by calling them a p-dophile regardless of any lawsuit or concrete evidence that would actually prove that the insult is true.
“… [need him] to engage with reality…”
Pithiest summary of the broader crisis I’ve seen yet.
sigh.
Curious how the advice for #2 might change if the person in major denial was their manager.
Said manager is absolutely steam-rolling over mandatory meetings with long diatribes about how everything is fine, straight up lies about how these EOs and policies aren’t actually harming anyone “because They wouldn’t do that, surely!” and bafflement over how to reconcile that they are in fact being harmed by the people they voted for.
These meetings are extremely rough, I feel trapped in them, and they raise my stress/frustration levels about 1000% (and I know I’m not alone in this in my office). Genuinely reaching a breaking point in this…
Is there a way you and your colleagues can work around this manager? Then you could just let him mumble to himself while The rest of you deal with the real.
It’s not the same thing, but when I worked at the grocery store our manager was carrying the work of two people and didn’t have time to hands on manage us. So we managed ourselves.
Good luck!
The problem is that this manager is doing this in mandatory meetings. So we’re all being held hostage in a tiny room while they do this.
My team does well at self-managing, so outside of these meetings we can largely avoid them. They had a habit of taking over meetings because they loved the sound of their own voice before this, but it’s obviously more frustrating/upsetting now
It sounds like you need to stop letting it upset you. Just let them talk and disengage your mind and attention.
If there’s important stuff that’s not getting done because of this, maybe your team could have a meeting without this manager to get stuff done?
I try my best to just dissociate through the meetings at this point. Was hoping maybe someone would have some magic answer to fix it lol.
Update from today, apparently have convinced themself that Musk will personally fund our agency “if he truly cares about the American people” Sigh…
Wow. Sorry you and your colleagues have to see that.
It will be a big shock to him when reality finally hits. If it does.
The problem is that this manager is doing this in mandatory meetings
Then I would say to go back to your manager and request that they shut him down when this happens.
Also, the manager may be hands on, but if you can document specific issues such as the meetings running over time, it might get them to be a little more helpful in dealing with this nonsense.
Sorry if this isn’t clear, the problem person *is* my manager (which is why it’s harder to shut them down). Unless you meant to go above their head to my grand-boss, which might not be a terrible idea… The grand boss can be a bit inconsistent on whether or not they’ll actually jump in to fix problems vs asking us to just grin and bear it. Worth a try though I suppose!
OK, I thought that Fergus is the manager of the linked group, with Arwen as your direct manager.
But, yes, go above both their heads. Also if you can ask Arwen to shut Fergus down in meeting where they are both there, that might be helpful as well if they are both on the same level.
I’m sorry you’re dealing with this. A long time ago, there were cuts to my department – some people were laid off and the rest of us had to find new jobs within the company. There were two managers in my area – one was “the sky is falling” and the other one was “this is going to be great”. It was really hard, and their opposite attitudes made it much worse.
In your case, the sky is falling, but you’re never going to convince them. I think your best option is to just not engage. Manager says something delusional? You didn’t hear it. Ignore and change the subject as best you can.
Ya know, if there is one thing this administration learned from the pandemic was how long it takes for human beings to process sudden, unexpected changes to their reality. So many people votes for *waves hands around wildly*THIS, and yet cannot process what that actually meant. POTUS is also taking this opportunity of complete upheaval to try to get his Kingship set as well. Its not surprise the people who votes for this are the same people who think it then doesn’t apply to them. What happens in the “Us vs Them” game when suddenly you are cast as “Them”?
+1
I’m not sure from your letter how much the context here is sharing in a general sense of dread (warranted) or specific planning around your work. If it’s the latter, maybe just framing it with him as “Here is a broad range of things that might happen. How should we plan our work to account for those possibilities?” This keeps it out of the view of anyone’s opinion about how likely this is to happen.
If it’s getting him to recognize the reality, I don’t know that that can be your measure of success.
It is his responsibility to recognize reality. He is choosing not to do that. No one can make him do it. He has to be willing to. So just disengage as much as possible and work around him. You’re not his parent or his therapist, don’t let this concern you.
If it’s the latter, maybe just framing it with him as “Here is a broad range of things that might happen. How should we plan our work to account for those possibilities?”
The problem here is that if Fergus is refusing to acknowledge the reality, which is apparently what is going on here, then his response is going to be to ignore the most likely events and plan for the things that won’t happen.
#1
I’d never heard of this meme or of this song. Bass on what I see, the song itself is from a pop album from the 1980s and the lyrics are not suggestive. I don’t think the song itself has anything to do with it being used in anime porn 40 years later.
Personally. I think it’s fine to use. It doesn’t seem reasonable to ban a song for guilt by association.
I mean, I associate “Stuck in the Middle with You” with graphic violence but that’s not really about the song.
I think this is flawed logic. You’re someone who says you never heard of the meme so it seems weird to assume you are representative of the possible reactions of the people who are familiar with it.
That may be true, but idk that that basing if the song is appropriate on. a certain subsection of the overall is a good standard.
If you go down that road most things will be objectionable to someone/certain sets of the population.
I’m not saying that that everyone has to object, but I would say something would need to be considered objectionable by a good chunk of the target audience to be pulled. Idk say 40%/50%+.
I think OP might be overestimating how many people will have actually have heard/seen this meme and find it objectionable outright.
But because the song was used in an inappropriate way “once” I don’t think makes the song entirely inappropriate to use ever again.
Hit submit too soon.
I’m not saying OP shouldn’t bring it up, they should. but OP should not bring it up in a sky is falling sort of way or say that everyone/most people will have heard of this song and find it objectionable.
But the whole point of the letter is that OP does believe it’s a large chunk of the demographic audience?
I don’t think even OP thinks that.
“the parents in the audience will be Millennials and older Zoomers, who are more likely to know the meme.”
are more likely to know the meme is different from will know the meme. but even among the ones who know it the people who will think it’s objectionable will be a subset of that.
I am in the group OP mentioned I had not heard about the meme, and even after looking it up, don’t have. a problem with the song itself. The song and lyrics are appropriate and fine for kids. just because someone else put it to an inappropriate video does not make the song itself inappropriate, imo.
This is where I come down too. I’m a chronically online millennial and had not heard of the meme. I really don’t think the meme is so pervasive that the song is completely tainted by association.
It doesn’t hurt to mention it since you probably want to err on the side of caution when it comes to things involving kids, but whether to change it depends on how worried you are about one overly sensitive parent causing a fuss.
I’m also a chronically online millennial, and do not know this meme. Just to add to the count :)
Thirding as another chronically online millennial.
“average millennial will recognize camel meme” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person consumes 0 camel memes per year. OP, who lives in a small corner of Facebook & sees over 10,000 camel memes each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
*Wild Cheering*
Hooray, I found one of my people!
(I’ve never heard of the camel meme, and I’m guessing most of the commenters here wouldn’t be able to clock Spiders Georg. The internet is a very big place.)
I think if the reason to discard content is “millennials/zoomers with terminal online disease have made a naughty meme and kids might get on the web and find bad stuff” can potentially remove *everything* from consideration. If the song itself is age-appropriate, I think making a fuss over it shows more over-concern than anything else.
If you search “Camel by Camel,” there are immediately results about the meme. It’s significant enough that the Wikipedia page for the song talks about it (and little else). If you search “what is the song Camel by Camel best known for” the results tell you it’s best known for this meme. It’s not that it just happens to be associated with this meme; it’s the primary cultural association of the song right now.
I looked up the meme and it’s not just suggestive, it’s a fully pornographic video. As in, graphic animations of intercourse and genitals.
It’s true that we shouldn’t be trying to shelter children from everything that could possibly be objectionable, but I do think we can draw the line somewhere and “actual pornography” seems like a reasonable thing to label “too inappropriate.”
Honestly this sounds like a perfect time for a nice round of Sally the Camel.
But that’s the video, no one is saying show kids the video or throw up on a projection while they dance.
The song itself is fine, nothing wrong with it and I assume the dance moves the kids have will be appropriate.
Except that a lot of kids, if they like the song, will go home and look it up, not realizing that they’re looking up porn.
IMHO it’s a bigger problem because the adult meme is the only reason the song has any connection to ancient Egypt, and therefore the only real reason it’s being chosen for this dance.
Well one could argue to that this song is pretty obscure. Its from the 80s, its from Croatia (or at least by a Croatian Artist), and made it only to the top 5 of the charts in Italy to name a few examples. The only feasible reason why anyone would have suggested this song (no even considering the “y popular demand” statement), is to reference this exact meme.
FYI my keyboard is trash ;(
…it is? I thought it was associated because it’s a song about camels and desert, and ancient Egypt is heavily associated with the desert.
I’m pretty sure the original music video also features ancient Egyptian costumes. I know because I tried to find the NSFW version and failed but sat through a couple of others waiting for the dirty part to start.
This is young children dancing to a song that is known by the target audience for adult content. In any other context, I’d be less worried, but at least a few of those kids has parents or an older sibling who knows the meme.
Also, to not “ban by association” is pretty arbitrary. Aerosmith’s “Don’t Want to Close My Eyes” was made for Deep Impact, but that’s not the cultural memory of it because it topped the charts and the movie didn’t have any staying power. On the other hand, that cover of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding out for a Hero” means it’s a Shrek song forever for a generation to the point where most of my peers don’t know it’s a cover. The most important issue is context: who’s going to see this, and what is their best cultural memory of this song.
“Holding Out for a Hero” is so wild for me because in high school I was in an excruciating performance of Footloose, so that’s what the song was tangled with for me.
Also I dunno, fwiw I still think of animal crackers when I hear “Don’t Wanna Close My Eyes.”
But more than that I think of DDR and saturday morning cartoons (someone made a really good AMV to the song with old 80s and 90s cartoons that just hit the nostalgia so good)
Being entirely fair, I’m coming into this as someone who was a little too young for Deep Impact. Having seen a review that included that scene as an adult, if I’d seen that as a kid it might have been scarring enough to be a core memory.
My group is more the “”Airplanes” is a Twilight Sparkle/Mordecai ship song” and “”French Perfume” is a Hetalia song” crowd.
As someone who loves that Antz and A Bug’s Life came out at the same time, I’m thrilled that you said Deep Impact instead of Armageddon (my, possibly inappropriate, film from middle school, and the movie that launched the Aerosmith song). xo
That is absolutely the movie I meant. My mind is a sieve, lol.
Ok – I *tried* not to post this, I really did, but Aerosmith’s “Don’t want to Miss a Thing” was made for Armageddon, which was the big box office success out of the two movies that year about killer asteroids, and lingers a lot more strongly in cultural memory. It’s a beautiful song, it really is, but it still strongly reminds me of Liv Tyler and Ben Afflick having a picnic together.
The difficulty I see with the kids’ song is that basically everything is going to have some dirty/negative association for someone, somewhere. I’d hesitate a bit to use Walk Like An Egyptian for fear someone called it out for cultural appropriation, or took exception to the reference to the Kremlin.
I raised an eyebrow when my kid came home from school singing APT, which I thought was about a booty call, but apparently it’s to do with Korean drinking culture! But I also rationally understand that all that will fly over their heads and it’s just fun to dance to. I admit I didn’t think about them looking it up though…
Point is, you will very quickly run out of music if you look too deeply. Maybe you could check with a random sample of people of the right age and see? I’m that age group and had never heard of either song or meme. It may turn out to be more niche than you thought.
How is Walk Like an Egyptian cultural appropriation?
My ex who was Egyptian (born and raised there) wasn’t wild about it. He takes his heritage pretty seriously (yes, even ~4000 years back) and found the goofy music video a bit… off-putting. Did not like it at all when people sang it at him or tried to imitate the typical dance. He wasn’t, like, up in arms about it, but the song is “walk like an Egyptian” not “walk like an ancient Egyptian” and it can be used as a vehicle for mockery for people from a certain culture to be sure.
I mean, the lyrics – “foreign types with the hookah pipes say way-oh, way-oh…”? It’s definitely giving vibes like that cat song from Lady and the Tramp.
I wouldn’t go that far, since all the cops in the donut shop also say way-oh way-oh.
But it’s a bit awkward.
More than that though, singing it AT somebody because they’re Egyptian is pretty icky. Makes me think of the episode of Fresh Off the Boat where the father was frustrated by how every time he did comedy folks just compared him to Long Duk Dong
I don’t think it’s cultural appropriation, but I do think it’s an uncomfortable caricature of another culture, so there’s that.
You have a point in general, but I think “this song’s strongest cultural association right now is a very explicit and memetic pornographic video and you will learn all of this quickly if you look up the song and many parents are likely to already know” is a perfectly fine line to draw, especially since the meme is potentially a huge part of why the song would be associated with Egypt and dancing.
I’m someone who knows the meme and is not someone who’s against kids being exposed to things like swears or mild sexual themes in songs, but if I were a parent, I would be BEYOND outraged if my kid were made to dance to Camel Camel at a school event. I’d see it the same way I would if my hypothetical kid were made to do dance moves normally reserved for adult clubs.
This is young children dancing to a song that at least a portion of the target audience knows for adult content. If even one parent in that audience knows the meme or looks up the song afterword, you’ve opened yourself up to horrifying allegations. It doesn’t matter if the child doesn’t get (I certainly wouldn’t have); it matters that that type of content appeals to predators. I fall on the side of, it is never worth risking using a song with adult connotations when choreographing a performance of toddlers.
5-7 is not toddlers; I’m not sure why I chose that word. The rest stands.
Yes, your comment gets to something I didn’t articulate very well in my own comment – I’d be thinking, “if this is what they choose to present to us, the parents, what on Earth do they think is acceptable behind closed doors?”
There’s a difference between a song that has significance for a few people and a song that’s become a meme/heavily associated with porn to the point where it shows up in search results about the song.
Yeah, I was the perfect age for “Walk Like an Egyptian” when it first came out – it was the first current-radio pop song I loved – and boy HOWDY does it not hold up.
Okay, but that bass line, tho
LW #1, I just want to really emphasize Allison’s “women in their 50s are not innocent old ladies” comment, because I imagine that’s part of what’s making you feel so awkward about broaching this. I’m in my 20s, both my parents are in their mid 50s, and they’re both very active online—I’ve had to ask my dad to explain memes to me before because he’s so much more active on social media than I am! I’m also involved in my city’s kink scene, and I know many people who are very active and regular participants in kink events who are in their 50s/60s/70s—very often, they’re the ones organizing things!
Given the “innocent old lady” comment, I suspect part of what’s making you hesitant to bring this up is that you think talking to the coordinator about this will have to involve explaining the concept of pornography and/or sexual internet content to her. To help with that (and to just gain a more accurate perspective on age demographics in general), I’d suggest mentally reframing 50 year olds from “This is a sweet and innocent elder who has never even encountered the concept of sex before” to “This is someone who’s been getting freaky with it since before I was born”.
It’s also not like the internet being weird is new. The internet has been weird as long as the internet has been a thing (which is several decades now)
And it’s not like overtly sexual songs are new, either. Plenty of songs going back to the 1920s and 30s are super dirty (always good to remember that if they are singing about food, they generally aren’t singing about food!)
Look at Chaucer! Phallic symbolism in Pompeii! Ancient Rome! To say nothing of all the other continents which have similar symbolism left behind for us to find. There have been times when people are more or less open about sexuality, but there’s always been spicy content.
It wasn’t just phallic symbolism in Pompeii. Pretty much full on phallus.
The romans used little winged dick amulets as good luck charms for little kids! (Their cultural attitudes towards phalluses were quite different from ours).
“I need a little sugar in my bowl…”
I’m your backdoor man
“The meat is sweetest closest to the bone” ISN’T about ribs?????
Ha!
Just look at underground comics in the 60s; fritz the cat etc. Media has always been a vehicle for the vulgar and weird! (admittedly a lot of freaky stuff might be somewhat more accessible now for those who care to go looking!)
I got an overview from my 1970s hometown paper. Its movie listings were on the back of the comics pages… including the X-rated listings and ads.
I’d argue that it used to be weirder? Or perhaps people got too coy and started talking in memes.
Starts singing Avenue Q “The internet is for porn…”
To add to your point and put things in more perspective.
A hippy who was 18 in 1960s (64 years ago) during free love/commune times, would be 72 to 82 years old now.
Somebody who is 50-55 now was in their 20s in the 1980s and 1990s. They will have Seen and Done Things.
Hell, even Shakespeare has absolute filth in it. I always maintain that if English teachers taught those bits, teenagers would find it a LOT more engaging.
Chaucer too. We were taught him by a priest at college and if the LW needs any more evidence that older people are not necessarily innocent, this guy was around 60 at the time, the turn of the millennium and while he was perfectly matter-of-fact and intellectual about it, he explained about how kissing somebody’s behind was viewed in medieval society and how the mystery plays often included stuff we would consider blasphemy today.
Now, of course, it is possible the particular woman the LW is talking about is innocent but if so, it’s not because of her age.
I remember going to see a production of The Mikado and one of my (very religious) classmates got super annoyed at the whole audience giggling at “dickie bird” and “titwillow,” insisting that those words didn’t mean such things “back then.” Sadly I was still in high school and not yet armed with the knowledge to turn around and tell her that the word “teat” predates English.
And the usage of the name of cute little birds as nicknames for them in English goes back as far as English does.
There are teachers who don’t teach those bits?! My GCSE English teacher threw the Oxford School Hamlet across the room and said, “Oh for goodness sake, these notes are ridiculous! It’s a reference to a brothel!”
If it’s ok for kids to learn about Shakespeare and Chaucer then, what’s wrong with this song in the question? Is it just the age of the kids?
You mean in the letter? Shakespeare isn’t porn, but if you search up this song you will find explicit porn of a character from Animal Crossing, which is a cute and child-friendly game. I think the issue lies in the fact that it’s explicit, so easy to find and looks so kid-friendly at first glance
Absolutely – there’s a reason those books are taught (usually) in high school! 5-7 year olds aren’t at that level of maturity.
I mean, I’m pretty sure we didn’t start covering Chaucer until late in high school
Yes, it’s just the age of the kids.
A 16 year old, who may already be having sex themselves, learning about the double entendres in Hamlet for their GCSEs/SATs is very different from a five year old unknowingly dancing along to a song from a porn meme. Surely that’s obvious?
Decades ago, my 9th grade English teacher got the entire class juiced on reading Shakespeare by doing just that, pointing out all of “those bits”! We took to the plays and poetry like divers searching for sunken treasure. Blessings on Ms. Moore, wherever she is!
There is a hilarious bit about this in one of Christopher Brookmyre’s novels where a teacher, TaRay, is teaching ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and decides to just go with it when students notice some of the dirty bits… I think it’s in ‘A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away’, which is well worth readng for all sorts of reasons.
Oh my teachers did. I came to high school looking forward to Shakespeare and really struggled when the teachers kept dwelling on the innuendo. Of course we had to know what the words meant, but the footnotes did that already. I was interested in the poetry, the characterizations, the theatricality. . . At the time – early 1990s – none of us had heard of asexuality as an orientation but it explains so much of my high school literature experiences. . .
I have told my kids to remember two things about English literature:
1. If you’re reading Shakespeare and you think “could this possibly be a dirty joke?”, it’s definitely a dirty joke.
2. If you’re reading Austen and you think “could that possibly have been snark?”, it’s definitely snark.
Shakespeare read silently in class by American teenagers: the innuendo doesn’t come across very well
Shakespeare performed on stage by British actors with the accent Shakespeare was writing for: the innuendo is really, really hard to miss
What confounds me is this: Older people are generally what younger people *come from*. Does the current generation think they invented sex and all the other thousands of generations of humans reproduced by, I don’t know, spores or budding?
My favorite high school English teacher did indeed teach the filthy bits, and we students were indeed engaged!
There are plenty of dirty old ladies out there, albeit I can’t speak for how open they’d be about it while doing children’s theater. Though saying, “Google for (fill in whatever”) might just cover it….?
Yes, just a ” it might not be appropriate. When you google it, things come up!” She knows what porn is so can fill in the rest
I like the phrasing of this.
As someone who’s been gettin freaky with it since before your parents were born, I thank you.
This is definitely my favorite reply I’ve ever received to a comment
Yeah, age 50 is Generation X, the grittiest generation alive IMO. We are not innocent.
OP4
I would recommend what an old employer did is have a “formal” exit memo/exit review for the intern and she it on company network with their “employee” file.
We would have the intern complete an exit memo (2 to 3 pages) dates worked, they summarized what they worked on, successes failures etc… This was submitted in advance then the manager and/or coworkers, could add their notes/comments/suggestions. Then the manager would usually hold an exit interview/review meeting with the intern.
The formal write up was saved in spot where most people knew. This is told to new people, so that in the event no one from the original intern still works at the company a person could go in and confirm the dates of internship, projects, and comments/feedback. But it also allowed the manager to quickly respond to reference requests without having to dig through their memory and/or files.
having the intern write the exit memo makes it easier on you and then you can just add your notes/comments/highlights at the end and save in your company and or personal files.
When I worked in higher ed career services, I picked up a habit from one of my own managers that helped all of us. She always asked if there was anything special she should highlight, especially any concerns that were being raised by the search committee, hiring manager, etc., and to keep her posted, if that changed as I was interviewing. I found this particularly helpful as sometimes I wasn’t the formal supervisor but just the one who a student employee could find when they needed a reference.
Neat!
In a similar vein, for all our trainees we prepare a general reference letter (with details on how long they were here, what they worked on, specific strengths etc.) when they leave. Part of it is that we are in Europe where – at least in some countries – such things can often be used without further involvement from past managers (so you can just submit the reference letter), part of it is the memory aid in case we are asked for a specific reference.
It’s a great idea to have a structured version though!
I was going to suggest something similar. At my last job, we were encouraged to keep an “I love me” file in which we kept track of notable accomplishments. Then when review time came, we went over these with our supervisors to refresh their memory so they could write reviews that truly reflected our work.
As an intern is in the process of learning work norms, something like an “I love me file” would really be helpful because it would help them see where they shine, understand what is truly valuable to the company, and learn how to advocate for themselves.
It could lead to a really good end-of-internship discussion, and LW could keep a copy to help inform their later references.
This thread is helpful, thanks! With the structure of our internship, I worry that having interns write their own memo or letter might be too big an additional task, but it may well be worth interrogating that worry.
Forgot to say that I’m LW4 there. :)
” With the structure of our internship, I worry that having interns write their own memo or letter might be too big an additional task,”
Without knowing the exact structure it is hard to say, but I have a hard time understanding why that couldn’t be built into their internship time/tasks? Especially since we want them to turn it in advance of their last day to allow time for review, they could work on it a few days/shifts before their last day, and only devote 1-2 hrs.
We were upfront about letting interns know this is something they had to do before they left at the beginning at the beginning of the internship and to take notes/prepare along the way. We also provide a sample(s)/template of anonymized ones from previous interns.
We tell them it shouldn’t take too long, an 1-2 hours, and keep it brief 2-3 pages with hard max of 3.
Writing the memo, and the actual exit interview is all done as part of their internship time/tasks.
I would also suggest taking a picture of them so you have a visual reminder to go with the name.
I will add to this, that if these requests are coming 5+ years down the line (and if someone stays in a position for a few years, it’s not unheard of for that to be a need for a while) then someone a former/current reference of mine has done is to ask for my resume. In addition to showing her what I’ve highlighted from the job, she can also link it to what I’ve done in future roles. So something like “she proactively asked for training on X, and it’s been nice to see it applied in future roles.”
There are going to be interns who either stay in roles for a while with just one supervisor, or will have one job where they don’t have a supervisor they can rely on for a reference. So it’s possible there will be folks in that 5-10 year range that may still ask, and their resume can be a helpful tool along with your notes.
Throw two strikes with one pitch
Feed two cats with one bowl
Free two birds with one key
Two Bird with One Stone is also a good one
“Feed two birds with one seed” was the one used in my very hippie anti-war teenage social group.
“Get two birds stoned at once” to catch other Trailer Park Boys fans in the wild.
Strangely the two birds / one stone thing came up today at dinner with friends – I discovered a friend uses “mash two potatoes with one fork” instead and I love it.
#1: I looked up both songs. “Camel by camel” seems much more boring and less fun for children than “Walk like an egyptian”. It makes me think LW might be right how the song came about to be suggested. The script is perfectly fine.
But I do not like the line about “innocent old ladies”. In my experience, most people in their 30s stop following the latest Internet trends, memes and hypes because of time constraints (family, job, daily struggles). This has nothing to do with unworldliness, innocence or age, but priorities, and LW seems to be making some big assumptions here.
If one still follows every trend, it is easy to overestimate how well known a meme actually is. But in this case it makes sense to me to speak up. This production shouldn’t be the place for a little inside joke.
This so much. I don’t follow memes and I’m not active on social media because it’s not something that interests me. That’s not the same as being unworldly. Other sources of worldly wisdom exist.
Absolutely. I hang out online and I enjoy those often nerdy sci-fi and fantasy memes as well as (some) political memes, but I’m not on social media, either.
Even the most online person of all time isn’t going to know every single meme or in-joke because it’s impossible!
Just out of interest, I searched the Camel to Camel song on DuckDuckGo. 2 of of the top 10 search results mentioned in the summary that it was used in a meme, but only one of the results mentioned that the meme was NSFW, so it would be easy to miss.
Yea, I don’t follow video based social media because it makes my brain feel loud ( I can’t explain? it feels like too many senses are involved or too much is happening?)
Sounds like you may find it overstimulating or it may be giving you some slight sensory overload.
I agree. I never hear about the latest Internet hype until I hear my 20-something year old coworkers talking about it at work (I’m in my mid-40s)
I’m late 20’s and I haven’t heard of it! I’m active online, too, it just wasn’t in my sphere. That said, still not something a young child should be dancing to.
Yeah the point of the meme is getting people to share it, unawares. So someone set up this children’s dance troupe in accordance with the meme.
It’s not an accident that someone suggested it – likely someone’s brother or son that it would be “hilarious” and now children are engaging with this predatory meme.
It’s not a debate around whether or not the song itself is lascivious or if it could be considered outside of the meme, but that the meme itself is unfolding.
OP please let the organizers know so they can pivot quickly.
Can we please have the Harlem Shake meme back? That was actually innocent fun…
Hi, #5 LW here.
I suspect Pam stays at work because she is unhappily married. She has come to work on a few occasions with her bags packed, stating she’s staying elsewhere for a few nights after fighting with her husband.
This isn’t the first time Pam has blatantly lied about something. I suspect there’s something going on with her personally / mentally. She has…other issues. That she lied about this fits in with her general character of someone who lies about stupid, easily disprovable things.
I summarized my conversation with Pam to send to her in an email, then texted her to confirm she received and understood. After this paper trail I think she has realized this is serious and (to my knowledge) she hasn’t done further unauthorized overtime. If she does, even once, it will definitely be a more serious and formal follow up action.
I was worried that a bad relationship might be the reason she insisted on staying around. I wonder if there is a public library open later than 5:00 that she can hang out in because she “has to work late.”
Depending on the kind of bad relationship, her partner could be tracking her location using Find My Friends or Life 360 so being anywhere other than work would be questioned.
I mentioned it somewhere furter up already but I had a coworker with that kind of problem. No bad relationship but rather no relationships at all. He had moved to our small town from a larger city and had no friends and aparently not much of a live apart from work. He always stayed insanely late and even came in on Sundays even after our boss told him not to.
I was going to say the same. I have a coworker with a complicated family situation, and 90% of the time it says “Alice Out” on the calendar she’s still at work. Sometimes at her desk, sometimes trying to hide in another room.
We have 4+ public libraries with great work spaces nearby, but she still chooses to come to work.
She may feel safer at work — harder for random family members to get to her.
If she’s in a potentially abusive relationship, that seems to change things a bit, at least imo. Not sure what can be done but I’d have some sympathy and try to work with her
Could she stay but not work?
I hang out in my office after work sometimes and read/text/nap. I’m salaried but I’m usually not working after hours if I’m still at the office.
These past posts have good advice for dealing with a (potentially) abusive relationship in the workplace:
https://www.askamanager.org/2022/07/dealing-with-domestic-abuse-in-the-workplace-2.html
https://www.askamanager.org/2023/05/i-think-my-employee-is-being-abused-by-her-partner.html
I’m amazed she lied to you, that her lying about easily disprovable things fits into a pattern with her (!) and she is still working there.
Sorry, but this is not a Pam problem, it’s a manager problem.
You can quote a certain song…
“You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
I managed a Pam and in my experience she will not stop. My Pam was also coming in on weekends. She finally quit but management spent way to much time monitoring what she was doing in order to document for HR.
I hope your issue is resolved but I recommend random checks including looking at what time she is saving files.
Re #2: I was a fed for close to two decades until I saw the writing on the wall and took the fork deal. Trust me that these conversations are unavoidable. When your whole day involves steering a ship towards an iceberg on orders of someone who hates the ship and the crew (and most passengers); it’s almost the only topic of conversation. So much so that I’m still getting almost daily texts weeks after I left.
My prediction for how this will turn out: Fergus will piss off enough people he’ll be told to go fork himself.
Two Ferguses, one fork? LOL
One Fergus, two forks seems more like justice to me
Speaking of memes that traumatized a generation…
for #4 here in Germany for any position you leave you get to walk out the door with a recommendation in hand that you keep on file and use from then on. I like that it’s an obligation to all employers though there’s debate right now because in some industries they are putting actual grades in it for the different areas of performance.
That’s correct, every employee has the right to a written reference, both plain (times of employment and major duties) and qualified (including performance evaluation). The latter is optional (i.e., the employee can request it).
A school I used to do some volunteer work in wouldn’t allow Walk Like An Egyptian because of its cultural appropriation, so they changed the lyric to Walk Like A Heiroglyph, which is kind of more accurate…
That’s correct, every employee has the right to a written reference, both plain (times of employment and major duties) and qualified (including performance evaluation). The latter is optional (il.e., the employee can request it).
…a written reference in hieroglyphic interpretive dance might not be very helpful though.
Hilarious misthread.
Yeah, “Walk Like an Egyptian,” isn’t a great starting place… I still think it’s the lesser evil though. Changing it to “Hieroglyph” could be a great option, especially if you paired it with lessons on alphabets like Cyrillic and Kanji.
re question 4, ever since it was created by “Trailer Park Boys” I personally have been using “getting two birds stoned at once”
I use this one too! Would love one that I can use at my workplace where that wouldn’t fly, though.
I mean, worst case Ontario, you just pretend you accidentally mixed it up and it’ll be water under the fridge.
INCREDIBLE.
that reference triggered me like a sleeper agent, lmaooo
love it but gotta try to avoid that one at work myself
I said the same in a comment further up and I am so glad to see more of you here! Rickyisms help get me through my day.
For the two bird expression, I’ve heard this but can’t verify since I can’t remember where the information came from (and google is no help :D )
When theres a big outdoors festival in India, the fruitsellers can go there, experience the festivities but also continue to sell bananas, so “Go to the festival and sell bananas” has the same connotations of accomplishing two things with one act, and absolutely no birds were killed in the process
I’m 54 and am amused at the thought that people my age never saw a sordid meme in our lives. The 2000’s was the Wild West of NSFW, yo.
yo
“Hello, fellow kids!”
Oh, this is very much NOT a “hello fellow kids” reference! Ending a sentence with “yo” died out in the early 2000s – I haven’t heard it as anything other than a greeting (“yo Adrian!”) in a LONG time.
That’s precisely my point! Adding “yo” to the end of a sentence seems like the kind of thing an older person would do in the mistaken belief it was “hip.”
It’s a reference to the early 2000’s Ally mentioned in that same sentence.
I think that’s the joke….
Indeed. I’m from the City of Brotherly Love. Y’all lucky I haven’t thrown in a “Jawn” here and there.
People always quote this incorrectly and I think it misses the best part of what makes it funny: it’s “How do you do, fellow kids?”
Just “hello” instead of the outdated and no longer used “how do you do” doesn’t have quite the punch of the original 30 Rock joke, not to mention that it’s coupled with Steve Buscemi’s backwards baseball cap and skateboard.
Well, I guess we WERE talking about memes and how well known they might or might not be…
Right? I’m an elder millennial and was on the internet when there were no, and I mean no guardrails.
Sometimes I wish there was some way to know what percentage of A/S/L statements were true or false. I have a long-held suspicion that a guy I was flirting with in the AOL chat rooms was not anywhere near my age.
They never were.
I can’t remember the number of times I encountered Goatse on a random web site – definitely no guardrails.
I know the origin of some memes… Something Awful is responsible for quite a few!
KnowYourMeme dot com is a great resource if you’re ever curious about a meme’s origins. I’ve fallen down so many rabbit holes on that site…
#5, I have no experience with this, but a lie that big and unreal makes me wonder what Pam is hiding. If she has access of any type to money or financials, I would check that thoroughly. Even if you don’t think she’d ever do that, I would check just to reassure myself.
I had a similar thought. At my previous job I worked Sunday – Thursday, and an employee who was on a Monday – Friday schedule would occasionally come in on Sundays to “get caught up” on her work, but didn’t want her supervisor to know she’d been in. I later heard that she and another employee had been caught stealing money and goods from the company (and it also came out that she’d lied about having breast cancer, but that’s another whole can of worms).
If anyone thinks old ladies are sweet and innocent, please read Frances Bavier’s (who played Aunt Bea on Andy Griffith) autobiography: “Queen Bee: The Wild Life and Times of TV’s original Bad Girl”
I wonder if #1 comes down to rights fees. Walk Like an Egyptian was a pretty big hit, so maybe it costs more for the children’s theater to pay for the rights to use the song. Still, there should be a better option
I don’t think Walk Like an Egyptian is a hit anymore and I don’t think cost is a consideration. It was released in 1986, this is highly likely before some of the participants parents were born.
A bigger consideration is that the song is pretty gross if you think about it for longer than 5 seconds.
That’s not usually an issue for these types of children’s theaters. You’re not charging admission for parents to watch their 5-year-olds sing and dance (you already charged them for enrolling the kid in the program) so there’s no monetization of copyrighted content. (Although even if you did charge admission, maybe that would still be fine? Bands don’t have to pay licensing fees every time they cover a song live, do they?)
The venue is supposed to play a licensing fee for any cover songs a performer plays, actually!
Not exactly! Venues above a certain size have to pay an annual licensing fee for performance royalties of any song performed, whether originals or covers. Because of a very specific law, artists do not have to get permission to record and release cover songs, though royalties due get paid to the original songwriters.
In terms of rights to perform the song for the children’s theater, almost all publishers grant these without a fee, when requested. It’s when you’re talking about Broadway or other large productions that fees (called “grand rights” for some reason) come into play. I would be surprised if this was a consideration, because while “Walk…” is a radio perennial, the song having a big TikTok moment is undoubtedly even more valuable to its owners at the moment.
You really don’t understand copyright and licensing. Whether or not you charge admission is pretty irrelevant (and many of these programs DO charge parents to come watch their kids perform!)
Public performance = you should be licensing it.
I can’t comment on music, but it’s certainly true for printed material. Copyright is fundamentally about distribution, not profit. You can’t print up copies of someone else’s book on your own dime and give them away for free without violating copyright. You can’t record your own audiobook version of someone else’s book and post it for free on YouTube without violating copyright. It’s about the artist’s control of their own work.
LW1 — please speak up, us crones in our 50s simply don’t have the time to keep up with all the slang and in-jokes that the Youth of Today share. It took me a year before I even cared enough to look up wth “skibidi toilet” was (and man was I disappointed).
I use “Know your meme” for this kind of thing. It’s very quick and precise. —almost 70
Umm “Walk Like an Egyptian” is also inappropriate, for other reasons. Eek!
Because it’s a dumb song with an annoying rhythm? That would be my reason for not using it.
I agree! I thought there would be a strident objection to that song for Obvious Reasons.
“All the school kids so sick of books…”
Even without everything else that would make it questionable.
Gonna be honest, that meme explanation was the most convoluted thing I’ve ever read in my life and I’m not even 50 yet (and used to be a professional blogger so like, I feel like I have some familiarity with the internet??)
Just give the coordinator a heads up, my god. Or don’t, who TF cares. But after reading that circumspect, serpentine explanation of the (very stupid) meme and its “oh poor Gladys, she just doesn’t KNOW” euphemisms, I feel like I need a damn Xanax.
Thank you. I was trying to think how to say that but, being in my 50s, just couldn’t get my brain in gear.
Yeah just tell her there is a non worksafe meme with this song and offer to share the information online about it. Then suggest if another song might be better.
It really isn’t difficult, just be brief and factual. Short and simple is almost always better than the level of confusing and protracted in the original explanation.
Lw1: just tell her, she can handle hearing about inappropriate songs and adult content. I looked it up because I had no idea what you were talking about, since it’s impossible to keep up with every interest meme and trend.
“Innocent old lady” in her 50’s made me lol!
This ancient 50s something old lady remembers Puff the Magic Dragon.
It’s possible to be in one’s 50s now and to have been in one’s teens when Sir Mix-A-Lot apprised us of what his anaconda did and did not want.
(laugh cry emoji)
Now now, I’m sure all that talk of buns was perfectly innocent. Maybe his anaconda ran a bakery? :)
Ebeneezer Goode was a very popular tune when I was in high school (chorus for those who are too young to remember: Es are good, Es are good, these f’ing Es are good).
I’m sure there are innocent people of all ages. But the older you are the more work it takes!
I remember when my 80yo grandmother showed me the video my cousin made of some of the guys in her dance troop singing “happy birthday” to my grandmother in drag. I was mortified (I was 13, it was my standard emotion), but realized that my grandmother clearly thought it was hilarious and maybe knew more about the world than I was giving her credit for.
#1 — I had a quick Google and the song used in the meme is a remix of an existing song from 1985. It also seems to have a secondary life as a general Internet-famous pop song, like Caramelldansen. So it’s possible that whoever suggested it genuinely didn’t know about the meme.
Still, you should speak up. I think it’s relevant here that the porn animation is fanart of a cutesy character from a family-friendly video game (she is one of the first image results). Kids will one hundred per cent click on that unsuspectingly if they look it up, and probably so would parents.
This was my first thought too. I’m a millennial that has never heard the song or meme, but my concern would be that kids or parents would search for the song because they like it and want to play it/practice the dance at home and that would easily be one of the first things they find. Please tell the instructor. It’s easy enough for kids to find inappropriate content online. There are lots of other songs that could be performed that don’t directly lead them to inappropriate stuff.
LW1: FWIW, I’m a meme-forward millennial and I’ve never heard of this! Bummer because it’s a real bop. Also agree that it could come down to licensing fees.
LW5: As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD later in life, I have stayed late to finish work because I was unm0tivated / distracted by constant meetings / work better once I’m not being pinged by constant messages and felt like I should have gotten more work done during the day and feel guilty for being slow. Doesn’t excuse the blatant lying, but I see others suggesting nefarious intent, and just wanted to throw out there that it may not be!
Also a meme-forward elder millennial (’86) and have never heard of this song or meme.
For LW5, though, were you salaried/exempt when you were staying late at work? Because this sounds like an hourly/non-exempt situation, in which case it is very much NOT ok to stay late after clocking out.
I feel like you have to be a bit of a furry to have seen this meme. But I’m also an ’80s kid and I’d never heard the song before I found out about the meme. (It is, as the kids say, a bop.)
OP #2 here. I sent this in about a month ago. Fergus is a little less sunny than he was (it only registered with him last week that we can’t hire anyone, well, ever), but he’s still overly optimistic. Arwen has had it with the positivity from Fergus and the Deputy, but we’re resigned to the fact that they’re just not going to face reality and someone’s going to get blindsided when layoffs start.
Now, if we could all remember how to act in an office space where everyone can hear everything (and I mean, everything), we’ll be able to get on with things.
When Fergus and the Deputy get to be Too Much, remind yourself that they’re going to lose their jobs too, only unlike you they will not be prepared. Sucks to be them.
Wishing you luck and sorry you’re going through this. As a horrendous personal tragedy alumna myself, I’m thinking this event may play an outsized role in the Fergus you have now… that is, if he’s different from the Fergus you had before.
Unrelated to the topic, but great username!
Not that this matters, but i was under the impression the “killing to Birds with one Stone” expression came from Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, where one of the townsfolk was talking about their new stone slinging style to take out two members of the Byrd family at once. Apparently it’s all in the wrist
It goes back to at least the 1600s. It supposedly originated in the story of Daedalus and Icarus. It’s a very old expression.
Honestly, if people eat chicken I can’t understand why it’s so terrible to use this expression. People have also gotten averse to “beating a dead horse” which is odd because I have never heard that and thought “well, clearly this person supports the beating of live horses.”
Yeah, they’re just expressions. I don’t see the fuss either, but if people prefer to use a different expression, I’m not bothered by that either. It’s kind of interesting to see what creative things people can come up with.
The image it conjures to me is that the rider has beaten the horse to death trying to extoll it to go faster, and continues to do so even now that it has died.
Yeah, just an expression, but it’s not a nice image, so I don’t blame anyone for preferring something more benign.
When my kiddo was very little, he got very upset at ‘kill 2 birds with one stone’. He decided we should change it to ‘pet 2 cats with one hand’. He’s 14 now and I still haven’t changed back.
“More than one way to skin a cat” is another rather upsetting one.
My previous manager actually stopped using that one due to having several cat lovers on the team.
I love it!
Love it.
I like that one!
OP1: How about looking up some traditional Egyptian children’s folksongs, choosing one with a lively, catchy beat and using that instead? See if you can find the Egyptian equivalent of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” or “Skip to My Lou”. Authentic and NOT porn-adjacent – that should do the trick!
And Alison was right: Don’t assume that 50-something women are innocent little old ladies! They may well have been happily married for longer than you’ve been alive and could very well teach YOU a thing or two about sex. Just because a person isn’t up on the latest internet memes about popular music doesn’t mean she’s “innocent” – trust me on that one!
“Something that eventually became part of the joke was that unsuspecting people (such as your grandma on Facebook) would share more appropriate parts of the meme saying, “Look at this adorable Egyptian cat I found!” And then all the grandkids would exchange glances wondering whether someone should break the news.”
For your consideration: Grandma knows exactly what this meme is about. It’s just funny to say something that makes young people wonder if they should explain it to you.
I remember doing this when I was young and now that I am middle age I can see my kids do this to me and their grandparents. It’s like “since they don’t know anything about sex and drugs I have to tread carefully.” But their grandparents were on college campuses in the 1970’s. You think Lil Nas X is going to shock them?
This is something that goes around and around and around.
Some grandparents act shocked by their grandchildren knowing off-colour stuff when the grandchildren are really young, and it’s often hard to read, as a child, whether the shock is from the dirty joke itself, or the six-year-old repeating it. So you get it in your head that you don’t repeat that kind of thing in front of parents/grandparents because it’s shocking, and kids and parents/grandparents both spend the next twenty years thinking the other has no idea.
#3
In higher ed, everyone pays for their own coffee.
True enough. But since I discovered how little most of our research assistant professors earn, I often pay for the coffee.
#4
Write up a “recommendation letter” for each intern at the end of their service.
As someone who manages interns – This is a no go for me.
1) I dislike writing letters and this puts extra work on me.
2) As a manager I put no weight in these letters, how would I know the person you said wrote them actual wrote them?
3) We have a formal reference process where we ask specific questions. So even if the person applying to job gave me a random letter, I would still need to call their reference.
The exit interview with feedback and keeping a record of the feedback for myself is the way to go. Also if I get a call from someone looking for feedback on an intern from 5 years ago I say, I am sorry that internship was five years ago I can send you to HR to prove their employment dates but I don’t have anything to add to reference questions.
As someone who was aware of the meme in question before this… I never expected to see it pop up here, lol.
I had a former manager who always said, “plant two trees with one seed.” It made me smile, and I use that phrase now too!
Yes – I’e heard ‘grow two trees from one seed’. I really like this
As a “little innocent old lady in my fifties” I am solidly a Gen Xer and grew up on the music of the 1980s. I can tell you that I never heard of this song- so the fact that someone from the younger generation of volunteers knows this song and it was suggested “by popular demand” tells me they know it and suggested it in the current context of something inappropriate. I find it hard to believe someone 30 or 35 years old knows this from 1985. These parents, if they know it, will also not know it as a 1985 pop song. Speak up please.
This is a solid point. I was in high school when this song came out and have no memory of it whatsoever.
It’s not in the top 100 songs. And scanning down that list, my brain is happy to autoplay a little clip for most of them. Never heard of this song before this thread. So it’s very much not like someone did a risqué meme to Like a Virgin (#2), Raspberry Beret (#51), or Private Dancer (#93).
Exactly. I think it was covered by someone new, but it seems as if that cover was made explicitly for the meme song purposes- so if the young people know it, its in this context specifically.
Thank you, Alison, for sticking up for non-innocent women of a certain age. WTF, indeed.
And I also hate that “kill two birds” expression.
#4: I used to have 4-6 interns for 6 months at a time for 7 years until I changed jobs. I kept a binder with their resumes, copies of their performance reviews, and their photo ID cards stapled to their resumes. I had it alphabetized with tabs to find people quickly. Each summer I also kept an ‘incident log’ of things that happened (accidents, stories about confrontations with the public, etc) and if one of the interns had a starring role that year in the incident log, I’d also keep a copy of it in their chapter. This binder served me well – I once got a call from someone about an intern I had 7 years prior.
Another approach is when the ex employee or student asks you to be a reference is to ask them to give you a page where they highlight the work they did with you mentioning particular projects. And ask for their current resume (I always assure them I am not looking for the final draft, just a working document is fine as I am using it to refresh my memory of their work). This way you have the particulars that will make a reference more helpful all around.
I had literally thousands of students and hundreds of grad students over my career and dozens of direct report colleagues — no way I am keeping files or remembering enough to write a good reference without this kind of help.
I wouldn’t think that it’s because she’s 50 (the horror!), but because many people aren’t up to date with all the memes. I deleted Tik Tok and other meme factory social media sites for my own mental health. I had no idea about this Camel by Camel thing, although I am the elderly age of 45.
I once got a call out of the blue to complete a reference on, let’s say, Emily Smith. I had no idea who the person was talking about and said they must’ve been mistaken. They called again asking if I was sure, because Emily Smith insisted I’d been her boss at ABC Corp. I had also never heard of ABC Corp. Three years later, Emily Smith connected with me on LinkedIn. I looked at her profile and realized I knew her as Emily Johnson, who had worked for me briefly (think 4 months), 10+ years prior, at what was then XYZ Corp. I had not spoken to her once since then and had no idea her last name changed, nor that the old org had changed their name. She clearly had my contact info, since she provided it to the reference checker, but she did not use it herself to inform me of the request. All that said, I wouldn’t have been able to help because I barely remembered her. I have never considered taking notes for potential reference checking. In my opinion, I’ll either remember you and what you did or I won’t, and if I won’t, don’t use me as a reference.
Oof, yeah, cautionary tale for Emily there!
It sounds like our situations might be different, but in my case, I have interns who are here for about 3 months, usually as college students. Many of them are good kids who learned the job, performed it well, and would have gotten an A- if this were a class, and I can imagine that five years from now, a lot of those will be kind of unmemorable for me. But to a young adult just starting out in their career, a reference from an internship boss whose overall impression was “just very good, not outstanding or memorable, but I didn’t actually need them to be outstanding so that’s fine” is really valuable, and I don’t want them to be penalized for having been unremarkably very good.
I know Alison can only give advice to the person who writes in, but this is why a reference-seeker should reach out to the prospective references first! And fill them in a little bit about what you want them to say, if possible, and DEFINITELY fill them in on name changes and anything else that might be confusing.
Are we sure that Emily provided the contact information? Some background checks require providing all employment history for X years, or all employment history in the profession. I can’t remember if I told my 2 former law firm bosses that the ethics people might contact them when I submitted that part of my Bar application. I think I did, but if someone had been, eg a career paralegal before law school, I wouldn’t fault them for not giving every prior employer the heads up.
Also, it shouldn’t be hard for the Bar to track down new contact information for an attorney, even if the applicant doesn’t have it.
I’m LW#4, and first of all, let me say that I’m delighted to have been the occasion for “feed two birds with one scone” to be introduced here! I hadn’t heard that one and it’s great. When I was a kid, I used to say “blow two wishies with one puff,” referencing dandelions that had gone to seed.
I guess the answer to how to keep track of past interns was even more obvious than I suggested in my letter, because I absolutely do feedback meetings with my interns. However, I have the bad habit of writing my notes for those meetings on scrap paper with feedback in notes-to-self format like “Tuesday thing.” The takeaway for me is that I should type those up and translate them into notes I’ll be able to understand a few years later.
Although I’m not a fan of Microsoft, I have found OneNote to be very useful for this kind of stuff as you can add screen captures, images, files, emails, etc., and then just send the entire thing as a pdf to other people if needed. I keep a lot of notes this way.
I hadn’t thought of that, thanks!
You could also create a paper form to follow as you review the intern’s performance and meet with them. Since it won’t likely need editing, you could just scan it into a notes system or just save the paper file. You’re likely already considering the same criteria for each so have a designated place to put that information could be useful. It doesn’t have to be complicated, even just dividing the page into sections can help. When I’m interviewing for a job I use a landscaped page divided into thirds with the middle third being the largest. The left third is for company related info with the company name as the header. The middle is for role and team related info and the interviewer’s info is at the top. The right column is for me with my pre planned questions and notes about how I match the job requirements. Those three sections keeps my notes reasonably organized and don’t interrupt the flow of the interview. I save the paper version and if there’s a second interview I create a mind map to identify what to focus on and any additional questions.
Isn’t bread bad for birds, though?
We have a kind of guest book for interns where each one gets a blank page to write something and add a photo if possible. You could do this in addition to notes. We have 6 to 8 interns each year for 6 to 8 weeks at a time and it’s really easy to forget them once they’re gone.
I need to give OneNote another try; I attempted it once but couldn’t figure out how to get it to work the way I wanted it to.
As a side note, I’m pretty sure that bread is actually pretty bad for birds, so I’m not sure how much better feeding birds a scone is than throwing a rock at them.
I work at a university and supervise student employees (50+ per year). They often ask me for phone references or letters of recommendation, including many years down the line. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what they’ve worked on (frankly, even for current employees, as there are so many of them!).
I’ve introduced a practice I find hugely helpful. Whenever they ask me for a reference or letter of recommendation, I have them complete a brief, standard worksheet. This includes information about which projects they worked on, their own particular contributions, and what they learned. I also ask them what particular skills they’re hoping to highlight for this job (do they want me to highlight communication skills for a teaching job, or analytic skills for a banking job, etc.). Of course, this is all balanced with my own assessment of their work, and my records, but I’ve found it hugely helpful. It gives me a good sense of their priorities and takeaways from their work, and is a good memory aid so that I can look back at records of particular projects. Almost all students are happy to put in the short time to complete a worksheet in exchange for a tailored letter of reference.
It also doesn’t hurt that this saves me a lot of time! I’d really recommend this practice to anyone supervising interns/student workers, especially anyone supervising *many* of them.
For my numerous student assistants, I keep a google doc with: name, semesters of employment, one or two bits of info. This is a minimal approach that I can use to jog my memory. This helps with employeer verification calls, references for recent employees. If they haven’t worked for me in a while, I ask for a resume. If they want a letter of reference, I ask for a resume and a draft letter. I don’t use their letter, but it helps me formulate what to write.
I personally believe the reason we don’t like talking about adult things with our grandparents is not because we believe they’re sheltered, but because we’re unwilling to disillusion them with the realisation that their grandchildren are no longer sweet innocent babies. Somewhere along the lines we got confused and thought we were avoiding adult topics for our elders’ benefit when, as has clearly been spelled out above, we really don’t need to worry about their supposed tender delicacies.
I think it’s a bit more that when you are in the habit of thinking of someone as a nonsexual being (as far as their interactions with you, like that there are no dirty jokes), it’s disconcerting to discover that they have this whole other side to the persona. Like encountering your first grade teacher at the grocery store, when your brain had not sorted her into this context, and so it’s just mystifying who this person is.
For your own age cohort (siblings and cousins) it seems natural to transition together into “now we are sexual beings who can tell off-color jokes to each other,” but it can still shock you that Great Aunt Hortense apparently is a sexual being. Both now, and when she was following the Rolling Stones around in the 60s.
See, I think it’s the opposite of that. Grandparents *know* that grandchildren are no longer sweet innocent babies. But equally, they’re not going to have Big Embarrassing Conversations or Lay Down The Law or whatever might be appropriate/expected from parents/teachers/authority figures. They’re creating a safe space for grandkids to just be, without question and without demand. Well, hopefully. :)
LOL that you think grandparent are disillusioned! Trust me, they are not. You’re not pulling the wool over them in the slightest. They’re just letting you think what you want. They’re grandparents, not idiots.
#1 LOL at the innocent old lady comment. We may not know the meme or song but we won’t be clutching our pearls if told. I’m in that age group and grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. Oh the things we saw and did in that era. It was an era of zero tracking devices for our parents. It was an era where late teens dated 20-somethings.
Yeah Gen X pretty much led the way, its just that no one can prove it!
At least once a week I find myself thankful to have grown up in an era where the only proof of my childhood misdeeds is my own memories and the occasional color photo.
Gen-Xer here, and I agree. That said, the current generation seems to be almost throw-backingly puritanical, which to me is actively more distressing.
So those of us in our 50s are now ‘innocent old ladies’? Dang.
Use it! Like the person in letter 5 who has everyone convinced she is not running an elaborate fraud scheme that she can’t just abandon at the 40 hour mark.
See also the book Killers of a Certain Age.
This reminds me I need to rewatch Arsenic and Old Lace.
But yes, becoming increasingly invisible as I get older has proved incredibly useful (especially since I have tricks to be noticed when necessary).
In #2 I’d try to cut Fergus some slack if he’s undergone a terrible personal tragedy. As you say this is probably his way of dealing with it on top of the work stuff. Maybe your cynicism is making him feel the way his optimism makes you feel? Sounds like you’re all in the same boat anyway!
Yep, sounds like Fergus needs to look for something positive right now, and he’s driving his point home to himself out loud. He needs to be shown some empathy.
Yeah, I’m not sure what would be accomplished by changing Fergus’s attitude. Like, you get him to say “I think I might lose my job,” and…what? He feels even worse on top of the tragedy in his personal life. Now everyone feels equally bad together?
It’s not clear to me when Fergus is making these comments, since the letter states that they’re both unprompted and in response to things that the LW and her coworkers are saying. But I definitely recommend limiting the comments about potential job loss within his presence, if possible. That would eliminate at least some of his responses.
Yeah, I was thinking “if this dude is having trouble getting out of bed in the morning or something, he may be using selective denial just to remain functional.” Annoying? Yes. But I think people who have gone through unimaginable tragedy deserve some grace—like the anti-vax lady in the letters a while back who had lost a child to SIDS. Or at least, I try to grant that grace because I would want it extended to me if I was faced with unbearable grief.
But I think people who have gone through unimaginable tragedy deserve some grace—like the anti-vax lady in the letters a while back who had lost a child to SIDS
As most people in that comment section pointed out, giving her “grace” needed to be a non-starter. Because as much sympathy as one should have for her, it was *still* not OK for her to try to push another person to not vaccinate their kid.
Same here. I don’t care what Fergus tells himself. And if someone says “Hey, do you think we’ll lose out jobs”, then they have to deal with whatever he says. But if he is bringing this stuff up in mandatory meetings? No. People who are themselves under significant stress should not be the ones who have to deal with the problems of his attempts at self-soothing.
Have you ever lost a child? It breaks a person’s brain. That lady needed to have boundaries drawn but you can give anyone grace.
My best friend in high school used to say “save two birds with one hand!” <3
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t it been proven that bread is actually really bad for birds? While “feed two birds with one scone” is more tasteful on the surface, I feel like it’s still encouraging behaviors that are harmful to birds, so I don’t really see as much of a difference.
It’s not harmful in and of itself, but it has very little nutrition for birds. They eat it, they get full, and then they get malnourished, because they’re not eating seeds. So no, we definitely should not give bread to birds.
Also, it molds easily and that can be very problematic for birds. It’s best to just feed birds birdseed.
But honestly, these are all just expressions, and I can’t see myself hearing someone say they killed two birds with one stone and thinking “Oh my gosh, this person throws stones at birds and then has the audacity to brag about it.”
I agree that these are all just expressions, which is why it’s kind of weird for me that people who are all upset about the stone version are so willing to jump to another one that’s still bad for birds (and in fact perpetuates a harmful idea)
Well I don’t think it’s common knowledge that bread isn’t good for birds. I never heard that until your post, so if others are similarly unaware it probably sounds like a harmless expression.
It’s not that deep, fam.
Exactly
No one is feeding scones to birds. It’s just an alternate expression for people who don’t want to use the word ‘kill’. People aren’t killing two birds with one stone either.
No need to overthink things.
I just turned 49 and I was unfamiliar with the meme, so I watched it just now. Yeah, it’s pornographic AF (tee hee) and you don’t want that associated in any way with a kids’ concert, but for myself I was just kind of disappointed. Boring, repetitive, obvious. Still, I guess I should enjoy it while I can until my next birthday when the same video will make me reach for the smelling salts and fainting couch.
Two birds, one scone – Love it!
My coworker and I always hated the saying “beating a dead horse” so we changed it to “beating a dead pinata.”
I am finding that a lot of the current crop of early 20s youngsters are actually in some ways more prudish than me (an old lady in her mid-40s) and my friends were at that age.
In one of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” books, two characters are discussing the differences between their thirtysomething selves and the younger generations.
One character says, “Think about it—in twenty years or so we’re going to be a bunch of fifty-year-old libertines living in a world of thirty-year-old Calvinists!”
(That’s not verbatim but it captures the feeling, and I still laugh every time I read it—it came true!) :)
I agree about the “innocent old lady” comments, but then why does the first line in the advice tell the OP to “speak up!”? I doubt she’s hard of hearing!
“Speak up” = ” Speak out” = “say something rather than remaining silent”.
It has nothing to do with the volume at which one speaks.
I am 50, and I am still surprised at least a couple of times a year by listening to the lyrics from an 80s song from my childhood and going “That song is DIRTY??!”Also, my dad’s company softball team was named the Afternoon Delights. But seriously, save this teacher from herself before a less understanding parent drags her in front of the school board.
I’m going out on a limb here…and I know this probably wouldn’t work. But could the reason be that Pam is doing this is so that she can try to get paid the unauthorized overtime? Such as, she tells her manager that she worked some extra time unpaid as a courtesy or to help out the company/project, then a couple days/weeks goes by, and she tries to slide into the payroll inbox with a ‘there was an error on my timesheet’
#3: I’m trying to get a cultural shift started among the people I know to just say explicitly if you’re planning on paying for the coffee, and then the other person won’t be left guessing. For example, “Hey, would love to pick your brain about X. I’d be happy to treat you to a hot beverage of your choice!”
I would love that! I guess it came up because I’ve never been the ‘senior’ person before. I’ve always been the Junior who offers to pay but then the senior insists on paying and wasn’t sure if I should be doing that now.
Feeding scones to birds is very bad for them. Please don’t do it.
#4: At my previous job we had about 10 interns a year. I kept a spreadsheet, with columns for their name, when they interned, strengths, weaknesses, what their project was, and any other memorable notes (where they were going to school, specific career goals, some personality quirk–whatever stuck in my brain about them and helped me remember them specifically). It’s amazing how quickly even details on good interns start to blur, but having a quick reference and going, “Oh, yes, Jane was the one who made a teapot painting project, she was really good,” can be super helpful.
#5, I would also see if there’s someone(s) in Pam’s dept setting a culture of unpaid overtime to the point where Pam feels she *has* to do it and lie about it. This is coming from somewhere.
#5 – I’m aware that I’m biased based on my profession but this *is* a classic fraud flag. If Pam works with money in any way I would go in looking for fraud. You need to figure out what she’s doing in those extra hours & why.
I had to deal with situations like #5 with 3 employees this past year.
1st employee was caught accessing company systems afyer hours when no one is supposed to be in them (overnight updates running) and caused the overnight scripts to fail … twice. He would clock out at 5 but then log back in a night to “practice running reports”. We had some long discussions about the seriousness of his actions and the liability he is opening the company to by not properly logging his hours, he’s been OK since then but the situation really made me see him differently and reduced the trust I have in him. He genuinely didn’t see anything wrong and “doesn’t care about money”.
The 2nd incident was less serious. I think this employee was talking to employee 1 above and got the idea from him. This is a new employee struggling with time management, she was very open about her struggles and I’d been coaching her through how to adapt to our workload. Suddenly she was doing great with deadlines and I was ready to write her glowing performance review. While discussing performance it came out that she was going in to the office Saturdays and Sundays to “organize her work” and “prepare for the week”. I told her that needed to stop because those things she should be doing during the workday and again reiterated the importance of being honest on the time sheet and opening the company to liability.
No issues since then, but I’ve never faced a situation where someone wanted to be paid less vs inflating their hours.
Re #2: I have a little sympathy for Fergus. I live in a major city and work in the suburbs. At the end of last year, all my suburban colleagues had their hair on fire about a policy change in the city that was scheduled to take effect on 1/1/25. They were all convinced it was going to single-handedly destroy our industry. I had to bite my tongue hard not to tell them they were overreacting, they didn’t understand the economics of it, and it was all going to be fine. I mostly (not entirely) succeeded in keeping my opinions to myself. (Three months into the policy, I was objectively right and they were objectively wrong, and thanks to my self-control, I can’t even say “I told you so.”)
In this case, I fear that Fergus is the one who’s wrong and OP who is right, but I can still see the workplace situation from his perspective. It sounds to me like Fergus just doesn’t know how to read the room. If he’s any kind of a decent person, kindly but firmly translating the room for him (“addressing it in the moment when it’s happening”) will be effective. I’d go that route before involving his manager.
“Solve two problems with one solution”? Boring but clear.
But there’s no reference to baked goods!
It’s like solving two problems simultaneously by using your loaf.
#2:
Maybe Fergus wrongly believes (as so many others have before him) that “they” will check party registration before firing anyone — i.e. “others” will be let go while he and other Romulans are guaranteed to be safe.
#3 — Just adding that there can be very specific “who pays” etiquette in different industries.
In the entertainment industry, specifically in Hollywood, the producer always pays. Even if it’s an aspiring producer having coffee with a non-producer who is in every way far more senior. My agent drummed this into me from the start of my career.
This is so set in stone that people know: If a producer doesn’t pick up the tab, don’t do business with them. They’re some version of a fraud or a wannabe or just a horrible person.
The entertainment industry is, of course, an outlier in many ways. But I’d be curious to know if other industries have outlier etiquette rules like this.
Since you’re pretty sure Fergus voted for this anyway, call ICE and report his tattoos (even if he doesn’t have them).
I was not expecting to see a letter referencing Ankha Zone today. (LW #1)
Just coming here to thank Alison for pointing out that women in their 50s (of whom I am one) are definitely NOT “innocent old ladies”!!!!!!!!!
OP1
Posted this suggestion before, but I don’t see it in the comments so I’m repeating it here: OP, Google “Egyptian children’s folk songs”, find a few with bouncy, upbeat tunes, get the English translations (to make sure you’re not inadvertently playing something reflecting VERY outdated attitudes!) and have the kids dance to songs that you KNOW are appropriate. Problem solved – and the kids will learn something about Egyptian folk music too! Win-win all the way around!
I second this! If the theme is Egypt, actual Egyptian music makes a lot more sense than cheesey American songs that happen to kinda mention Egypt or deserts.
3: it is standard, conventional etiquette, in every way i know of at least, that in a business setting gender goes out the window.
in a social setting, conventional etiquette will occasionally require different things of men and women (and all the nbs have a thorny time of it sometimes). standing when someone enters a room, who is allowed to initiate a handshake. at work, none of this applies.
although i don’t think who pays is gendered even in social settings, anymore. in most situations, you expect the person who asks or invites to pay, afaik. social or professional.
I guess I should clarify that I asked about gender because I wanted to make it clear that this is a business meeting, not a date. As in, if I let him pay for me even though he is more junior, would that be construed as a date?
But happy to know that I don’t have to worry about that and should probably have just let him pay!
in general, i would say in a business setting the go to assumption is that it is never a date.
…some people will think it is regardless, but that is a problem they themselves have and it is not one you can reliably guard against in any way.
spiders georg thinks every interaction is romantic, and should not be taken into account.
Unhelpful trivia: the Swedish-language expression for killing two birds with one stone translates as “hit two flies with one stroke” (slå två flugor i en smäll), often changed into göra två flugor på smällen, which translates as “put two flies in the family way”.
I think that also addresses the child-unfriendly meme topic, and I’ll get my coat now.
#1 reminds me of when my best friend, who is a preschool teacher, had to explain to a co-teacher why singing a song about a beaver tree was not appropriate, lol.
I agree with the advice to please tell her.
LW #1’s situation is kind of like a real-life smash up of
– the big scene in “Little Miss Sunshine”
– Boaty McBoatface-type outcomes that can happen when you open a decision making process to a large group of people … many of those people are likely to lob suggestions based on what amuses them.
OP, please please please let the organizer know about the meme.
OP #5 – I dealt with the same exact thing. The blatant lying is so jarring. We started formal discipline over working unauthorized OT.
Oof yeah, LW1 really chose violence by describing a woman in her fifties as an “innocent old lady.”
A thought for LW#4: In addition to the exit interview and asking them to document their accomplishments and learning, as others have suggested, tell them directly that their best chance of you serving as a good future reference is for them to stay in touch. This isn’t about your memory alone; it’s about their care and feeding of their professional network. They should occasionally let you know what they’re doing now, what kind of work they’re looking for if they’re hunting, something cool that happened. Their goal should be to stay top of mind for you so if you hear of an opening you think they’d be good for, you have a sense of why that is and you have their current contact info.
I’ve had quite a few interns over the years. I tell them this story every time and yet it doesn’t happen. The story: The ONE intern who did a good job of staying in touch was an older student, which may have contributed to her well-calibrated follow-up every 2-3 months with a brief note on what she’d been doing and learning and how her job hunt was going.
She ended up hearing from me about an unadvertised opening. I also told the hiring manager they should interview her for it. She got the job, she ended up getting the hiring manager’s job when they left for something else, she thrived and went on to a really successful career, she’s now a partner in a leading firm in that field.
Everything that flowed from my initial lead to the job is based on her own talents, but she got the lead by staying in touch with me. The ones who disappeared? They’ve disappeared. That’s all I know. I couldn’t give them a reference.
#5 – I was Pam, once. However, my work was solid. The reason I stayed late, building out profiles of my prospects (so I’d know what to talk to them about) or writing helpful reports for my team, was because I hated being home. At home, waiting for me, was an emotionally and verbally abusive now-ex.
I knew it would look weird to clock out and then sit in my cube watching YouTube videos or reading a book, so I just did low-level “work” things.
When my manager finally explained the legal liability, I got permission to spend my time logged into the company’s online library / learning center to increase my skills, arguing that it’s no different than if I were taking classes after work.
I’ll note that the only lie I ever told was what time I’d clocked in that day or how long of lunch I’d taken, if a non-manager asked me why I was staying so late (as in, when they came in at 9:00, I was already at work; and then I was still in my cube at 6:00 when they were going home).
#1: Wait, what???? You’re calling a woman in her 50s an “old lady”? That’s offensive.
Pepople love to complain about how “clueless” boomers are, but young people can be just as clueless
I’m also someone who has unimaginable tragedy less than a year ago and frankly I just wad trying not to do myself in many days, I couldn’t deal hearing people freak out about politics because I was still having ptsd. I had a friend who couldn’t handle this and we had to stop talking. I will exit most conversations like that. And no it has nothing to do with who I voted for, it has to do with witnessing and experience horrific trauma, it changes your perspective and you cannot handle freaking out about some things because you may not make it to another day if you add more to your emotional plate.
LW1: not sure what’s more upsetting; the p-song kinds are unknowingly dancing to or the fact you think a person in their 50’s IS OLD!!!!! I agree that you need to speak up now to prevent a rightful backlash from happening. And also, Please realize that while you may consider yourself “young” now, decades have a way of sneeking up on you real fast
I’m late to this party, but a friend hates the “two birds, one stone”. She instead started to say, “Light two candles with one flame” and I love it!
In less than 20 years I will officially be an “old lady” apparently. Nice. Won’t get any of the perks or discounts, but I guess 50 is the new 90.
LW 2, “Walk Like An Egyptian” is racist, please don’t use that either! Yo have to speak up, this is disgraceful!
To the LW with multiple interns: I’ve been managing interns for about 14 years but not so many as you have to. Keep a log, all of that, yes. But also, when someone asks for a reference it’s OK to ask for a brag sheet: let them highlight what they think they did well and what they want you to highlight. When I applied for my doctorate, I asked my master’s advisor for a reference even though it was 15 years out. She said she would do it if we could meet on Zoom and wrote a good recommendation. You can offer that, too, a 15 minute Zoom call about how things have been to refresh your memory.