Age has conferred upon me the status of Amateur Workplace-Behavior Historian. Notice I wrote “behavior,” not “culture,” because no one I worked with when I entered the job market in the early 1980s used the word “culture” in the context of the working world.
I work with colleagues who — with a couple of exceptions — are at least half my age.
Surveying a 37-year career, I have to say that being one of the oldest employees is more fun than being one of the youngest.
When I was the new guy in the shop, I marveled at how older reporters churned out three stories to the one I produced. I listened with envy as they shouted out a question at a press conference, immediately drawing the attention of a governor, presidential candidate, or police chief while I stammered out something unintelligible.
No one knew my name and no one gave a damn about what I wanted to ask them or write about them.
Nowadays (that word alone betrays my age), I can’t walk down the street without running into someone I know and who invariably joins me on a walk down Memory Lane. The cops I run into recall the tragicomic crime scenes they responded to and I reported on.
Political gurus and movers and shakers recall liquor-soaked political party conventions and “times” for candidates we attended in younger years.
Colleagues I encounter recall newsrooms where smoking, drinking, sexist language, profanity, and fights ran the gamut from workplace habits to diversions from the daily grind.
Political correctness was in short supply and “diversity” was a word alien to the working world I joined, beginning with my first job at the State House, where dress shirts and ties were a minimum sartorial expectation for men and dresses were mandatory for women.
Smoking had already been banned in offices by the time I started working, but ashtrays remained in foyers and hallways like sentinels staking out turf in the hope that “lighting up” would become popular again.
Drinking on the job was another matter. A beer or two (or . . .) was no big deal in my early days on the job and we even bought a round for the publisher’s father when we spotted him in his corner booth nursing a martini. The workplace Christmas party included a full bar until at least 1995. Booze-fueled behavior was almost, but not always, kept in check.
I started working when mobile devices were the stuff of Buck Rogers stories (no under 40 knows who Buck Rogers is). Mayors are busy people and if I wanted to get one in Lynn to answer my questions, I had to stake them out. I could reliably find one Head of the City smoking next to the City Hall Dumpster. Corralling another involved jogging next to him on Nahant Causeway.
I am grateful for the open-door policy the late Patrick J. McManus accorded me. But His Honor didn’t always give me a friendly reception. If he liked the story I wrote on a given day, I got greeted with, “Yo, Scoop.” If he was mad at me, he stared at me for a few seconds, his face wreathed in cigar smoke, and then said, “Oh, Scoooop,” before unleashing a torrent of profanity.
My young colleagues seem happier and more sociable than I remember being as a young reporter. But they also seem less imbued with a sense of urgency and competitiveness. In my day (showing my age, again), you had to aim high to land a story on the front page and two days in a row without one meant your star was plummeting and a grim future filled with obituary and press-release rewrites beckoned.
Then again, younger reporters, probably like all young people in the workforce, seem to have a broader sense of their options and opportunities than I remember having as a younger worker.
Thanks to good parenting, social media, or maybe just evolution, they seem to have more confidence than I remember possessing. I guess that’s good news for journalism and good news for the working world in general. Or at least I hope.
