aged
lately i've been feeling pretty old.
every once in a while my 24-year-old assistant will drag himself up to my office, looking bleary-eyed and worn because of a late night or a long weekend. me, i look like that every single day. as the full-time working mom of a toddler, it's expected that i look like that. depressing.
when i started working at my current job, i was two months past my 23rd birthday and green, green, green. coworkers called me an ageist because i believed 30 was old and teased me for being young and thinking young. but then they started hiring people my age and younger -- the summer supplementals were practically kids. at 25, i got my first assistant, a nice girl a few years younger than me. just out of school and living with three other girls, she was bright and bubbly and clearly destined for better. we'd chat and i'd feel old, so married, so out of touch, so not going to clubs and movies and doing all sorts of fun la stuff for people in their early twenties.
now i'm almost 31 and my assistant is 24. my assistants will perpetually be 23-24 because the job is marketed to recent college grads who don't yet know what they want to do. i once had an assistant my age, but of course she ditched me for a better-paying job in the same dept. i don't bear her any malice, though, because i would have done the same thing.
it's really hard to believe that i was once the youngest person in my dept. back then i felt like i was only going to stay a year and then be on my new-and-improved way with a shiny new listing on my shiny updated resume. but the years kept on passin' and eventually i found myself to be older than not only the summer supplementals, but the summer associates and the fall ones as well. soon i'll be the same age as the most junior partners. that's a sobering thought. our personnel directory lists degrees for managers/supervisors, paralegals and attorneys. occasionally i'll be looking through it for someone and i'll be struck by recent graduation dates. mine are mid-late 90s and i already see the glint of patina.
sometimes i feel like life is passing me by. i say i'm a lifer here and i fear that this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. it's not a bad place to be and i have a connection here, but... (almost eight years here. that seems to be pretty rare these days.) a friend recently confided that after a breakup with a longtime boyfriend, she was thinking of quitting and starting over somewhere else. a big change to distract from another big change. she wanted to take classes, improve her standing in her own eyes. i said i too wanted change and wanted to better myself, but privately wondered if this was true or if i was just trying to show empathy. truthfully, it's sometimes painful to think about getting old here in this one spot. it's painful to see the firm hiring younger and younger and to feel like one possesses a most outdated point of view. youth brings change! youth brings rebellion and innovation! i'm hardly old, but yet i sit here, plugging away at the same damn thing i've been doing since i was 24.
i suspect these are just pre-new year doldrums and they'll pass soon enough. at the very least, i am thankful that my job isn't necessarily just a job for young people. at dinner the other night cam told me that in a few years (i won't say how many here in case his boss is reading this) he thinks he'll be unable to program -- the mind for it just won't be there. that's scary. what do old programmers do? all of you developer-types out there, which of you actually want a predestined mid-life career change? youth be damned.