Crashfrog:
quote:
Everybody, nowadays, does the servant thing. Everybody seems to clue into this - and realize that the pizza guy, the waitress, and night desk guy are just as educated and trained as they probably are - except the old folks.
I'm a senior citizen by some accounts and yet I can relate. I work almost exclusively for people older than myself. I do in-home care for handicapped persons. Handicapped by advanced years and all that goes with that - strokes, cancers, arthritis, liver disease (drinkers), respiratory disease (smokers), etc. The worst, however, are the few who haven't paid attention to what is going on in the world around them. You know - the Ignorant: people who know it all and have always known it all; - and the Specialists: people who worked the same menial task year in and year out, never learning anything they didn't need to know. Specialists are more tolerable than Ignorants but have very strong opinions based on hearsay only.
Are seniors really the crankiest people in the world? That hasn't been my experience. There have always been people my own age who seemed to make a hobby of being disagreeable. Perhaps "curmudgeons" are more likely to survive hard knocks. Perhaps there are more of them among the old because the nice guys have been decimated by the aforementioned challenges of old age. I don't know. But I agree with (who was it now?) who said,
"I give respect to those who show themselves respectable."
To any here who might feel that age itself warrants the qualities of deference one considers appropriate to one's grandfather, I would ask,
How old is Sadam now?
db
[This message has been edited by doctrbill, 08-13-2003]
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