Just the Elderly Assistant

It is official. I am old. I thought it would come more gradually, a gray hair here, a sunspot there. But no, elderliness has sprung upon me, as if a stranger pounced upon my Wal-Mart shopping cart and unloaded a heap of patterned muumuus inside while I was busy scouring the tabloids.

It all started when my Bosses hired Andie.

Andie is 25. Andie is gorgeous. Andie is so young and hip that Microsoft Word isn’t even picking up on her name, and every mention of her on my screen sits underlined in red. Andie has made me realize I am an elderly writer, fumbling around on the Internet with my head tilted up so that my glasses can adjust to the screen light.

Last week I casually asked Andie for her opinion on a dessert I was making for my dinner club. “I’m making homemade ice cream sandwiches with ginger cookies. What flavor ice cream should I put in the middle?” I asked my shiny new co-worker.

“Hmm…” Andie thought. “How hipster is the crowd?”

My dinner club consists of me, my husband, and fourteen thirty-seven to forty-something-year-olds who like to sit around and talk about life goals and drink good wine. I honestly don’t even know what a hipster is, and I have a hunch my beloved dinner club doesn’t know either.

“I’d say, we are about zero hipster.”

“Mmm. Go with vanilla.”

What’s that supposed to mean?

And then today…I asked Andie to judge the caption contest from last week’s blog. Even though I already knew which one she’d pick since she’s really funny and I’m really funny, I wanted Andie to be the judge so that this would be a fair contest. I even hid the entrants’ names so that she’d only see the captions.

There was one stupid entry toward the bottom. I almost deleted it because it didn’t even make sense to me. But fair is fair, so I gave her a full report of all the entries. And you know which one she picked? Do you?

That stupid one toward the bottom. She said, “You wouldn’t pick that, too?”

“Uh, I don’t even know what that’s talking about.”

“HAHAHAHAHA! It’s talking about the most watched video on YouTube. 2 billion views.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the winning entry in the caption contest:

Hayley: Check out this gangumstyle you tube video
Chad: Wow, how does he do that?
James: Man, i need some glasses, what is this gangaumstyle?

No clue. Congratulations Markus from Houston. I hope you enjoy your t-shirt.

I’m off to the Wal-Marts and then the beauty parlor to have my permanent installed and hair dyed blue.