From The New Paper July7, 2007:

Real life doesn't move at broadband speed

By Ian Tan
08 July 2007

MY friend was telling me an amusing anecdote about the rookies working in her public relations agency.

She said: 'These rookies are fresh out of school and they don't want to do the basic PR work like doing press clippings or monitoring media coverage.

'They tell the boss, 'I don't want to do all this simple stuff! I want to sit down with the client and talk strategy!'

Strategy? With what they've learnt in school? What gall.

We once had an intern photographer who had an assignment at Lakeside.

It was about 6pm and she calls one of the senior photographers in the newsroom saying: 'Erm, Jon, I need to take a taxi.'

'Where are you?' he asked.

'Near Chinese Gardens.'

'Isn't there an MRT station right outside the gardens?'

'Yah, but Lakeside is quite far from our Toa Payoh office. The MRT is really a long ride.'

'So what do you want to do?'

'I don't have any money on me right now.... Can you lend me some money to take a taxi? And wait at the office lobby when my taxi arrives to pass the driver the money?'

My colleague lost it and hollered into the phone: 'DO I LOOK LIKE AN ATM TO YOU?'

Of course, all these stories are purely anecdotal. They are obviously not representative of the entire population and I relate them just for fun.

But one thing is for sure - as our living standards get better, as our kids get better educated, we not-so-old folks (I'm just 30) are finding that the youth tend to be different in certain visible ways.

Having grown up with the Internet most of their lives, they seem to have the idea that you can get instant gratification all the time, much like downloading an MP3 song.

If nothing moves in their favour at Internet speed, they demand instant answers.

Nothing wrong with that, but how about some good old patience too?

Most good bosses rise to their jobs by starting at the bottom and clawing their way up the corporate ladder, but I've seen many younger chaps who think they should start their careers near the top.

Some of them also think the world ought to be handed to them on a silver plate.

After all, in school, they had all sorts of enrichment programmes, 10-year-series books to conquer every possible topic, high praise whenever they thought out of the box and so on.

Want to know anything? Just search Wikipedia or Google.

Well, the real world doesn't always move at the pace that we demand, nor does it always serve up all the answers we seek.

At least the correct answers, that is.

I notice that some people, when they don't get what they want at short notice, will then start pouring their frustrations on their blogs for all to read.

Whatever happened to the inner monologue? Must they tell their most private or emotional thoughts to the whole world?

Do people stop and consider before writing damning statements online?

As the in-house techie of this paper, I embrace technology in many ways.

But one thing I hate is the way the Internet has convinced many people that they can know and do everything in the shortest possible time.

It may have also caused people to think less before they talk (or post comments online), hence the really silly request by the intern who found herself at Lakeside with not enough taxi money.

Do you think the Internet is going to doom our future generations further? Or am I just suffering from symptoms of the usual generation gap?

Is this what our younger generation going to be?
Have they had too good a life so far?
Do they know what suffering is?

I do believe that the younger generation has no patience. They are not persistence. They don't like to wait for things. They want everything fast, fast, fast. Now. Now. Now.

I sometimes wonder what will happen to these generation if a depression was to happen. They lost their job. Then what? Can they weather hardship? Or do they give up? Then their parents have to clean up after them?