Earlier this evening I needed to go on line and check my messages. As usual I had to remove one of my son's from the Internet (no easy task as many of you parents know) he was playing Rune Scape and was quite involved in whatever it was he was doing. Once he switched places with me my son decided to sit next to his "old man" and watch me while I checked my messages and this was when things got interesting.
I deleted most of what was on there and then proceeded to open up a message from a fellow Realtor. The message was short, saying how I should read this great article that had appeared in the Union Leader (this is New Hampshire's largest paper). I opened up the PDF and scanned the contents of the article. It was a nice piece on why Buyer's should decide to purchase now, rather than later. After scanning it for a few moments I closed it, saying out loud that I would read this "good article" later and maybe even consider passing it on to others to read, and this is when the moment happened!
I noticed out of the corner of my eye, that my son was looking at me as if I had two heads. I turned to him and asked, "Hey Sean what's up?". He did not immediately answer, instead he started to fidget after all he had Dad's complete attention. I then smiled at him and asked him again why he was looking at me so funny, to this he replied "are you going to actually read that article later?". Now this really intrigued me, why is my son asking me something like that?I took the bait and answered him, " Sean I'm going to read that later, because I think it is probably a good article about what is going on in today's market, is there a problem with that?". He then said to me, " Dad that article is almost 3 months old! do you think it has any relevence to what's going on now?" This just stopped me dead in my tracks, I had scanned the article, but I never looked at the date it was written. I checked the article again and sure enough, it was from September 13, 2008! I was stunned by this, first because I could not believe someone would e-mail me an article from 3 months ago, but second I was stunned at how my son had reacted.
The lesson I learned from my son was this, information to today's young people really does need to be instantaneous if its even a few days old, it is no good. My son showed Me how the typical Generation X,Y and Millennium child view things. He was really stunned when he thought that I found a 3 month old article relevant, once he realized that I had not seen the date he was immensely relieved that I was not that out of touch with the world!
Thanks Sean
Comments(15)