A recent New York Times article asked the question What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace? The scene that the writer describes at the offices of the news website Mic is one that’s supposed to make the reader gasp in horror. An employee lies about attending a funeral to get time off. Another employee asks their boss for an apology and yet another eats a tuna sandwich during a meeting. Truly some grim stuff, guaranteed to hasten the collapse of polite society as we know it. After all, the tuna sandwich was being eaten at 10am. Is there anything more revolting than the smell of old fish and mayonnaise before noon? Yes, there is and it is called a trend piece about millennials.  If this article is to be believed, when left to our own devices, millennials (a term clearly devised by Satanists attempting to hasten the fall of mankind) devolve into monkeys flinging poop at each other through the bars of a cage at the zoo. Without the supervision of someone who remembers when there were only three TV channels, these damn kids will play Pokemon Snap and Instagram photos of their genitals to each other instead of doing any actual work. It’s a form of anarchy never before seen on this planet. Ask any old person and they will tell you that we’re all riding a giant hoverboard straight to hell.  Except this vision of the modern workplace is totally fallacious, not because it’s untrue that some people my age need hugs every 15 minutes, like to eat at odd hours of the day, or are prone to telling lies. I’ll grant you that all of those things are true. I just won’t tell you which ones are true, because I’m a deceitful, two-faced millennial. What’s inaccurate about this and other trend pieces about the current state of office culture is that everything is so millennial-centric. The ideal millennial workplace doesn’t exist. There’s still plenty of annoying aspects to the modern office: dumb stuff such as responsibilities, meetings, income taxes, a lack of bidets, the inability to light fireworks in the parking lot whenever life gets too stressful – and performance reviews. None of those aspects of employment are rad or tight or on fleek. Most of them are quite lame/harsh. Ping-pong tables and free Clif bars sound great in theory, but that won’t always be enough to placate our short attention spans and thirst for gratification. What we want is to feel validated and comfortable. We want to be able to sneak away to a couch to watch Spongebob reruns on our laptops at 3pm without some bald guy wearing too much cologne telling us that’s not “a good use of company time”.  Consider all the perks not offered by employers that would appeal to me and my fellow aspiring adults. Go to the supply room in any office and you’ll see plain, drab manila folders. If millennials really ran the workplace, those stuffy old folders would be replaced by Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers.  When I go to work, I have never had someone stand up during the middle of the day to tell me I’m beautiful, which would go a long way toward encouraging me to show up more than twice a week. Like everyone else, I need to be reminded that I’m gorgeous and easily could have been a model with the right emotional support. The writer of the Times piece has no clue how difficult it is for me – the clueless, mouth-breathing man-child “90s kid” who can’t figure out how to tip at a restaurant without calling my mother for advice – to function when my office manager refuses to stock Fruit Roll-Ups in the break room like I’ve asked for the past six months. I’m adrift and hopeless. I’d vape myself to death if it was allowed in my office, which it is not! Give me vape or give me death. This is America, dammit. Discriminate against me for being young if you must, but the tide is turning, friends. The chill will inherit the earth.  So, what can we do now to make working easier for the millennial employee? How can we avoid repeating the cautionary tale of Mic as told in the New York Times (my favorite iPad app, by the way)? Here are just a couple suggestions that could easily be implemented in offices around the country with just a few billion dollars of investment in quality of life for millennial workers.  A hoverboard is a great invention that releases us from the burden of having to walk places like the bathroom, refrigerator or bed. The only problem with the hoverboard is that you have to stand up to use it. Who likes standing up these days? Establishment politicians and fat-cat bosses, that’s who. I’m always seeing guys like John Kasich standing up like they’re better than us. Ooh, you look so cool on your feet like that, looking down on the rest of the world, Mr Fat Cat. The CEO of JP Morgan Chase stands up like he was born that way.  The workplace of the future will allow you to lie down for hours, like God intended. What I propose is a floating bed, or a hovering stretcher of sorts, that would transport workers to and from their desks. These transportation devices would simulate the sensation of sleeping in and skipping work, thereby relieving millennials of the temptation to call in sick or work from home. Virtual reality headsets such as Oculus will allow employees to watch the last hour of the Today show and The People’s Court just like they would from their comfort of their own bedroom.  Once you’ve been deposited into your work pod (which is less a desk and more a miniature recreation of Central Perk from Friends), a feeding tube is placed into your mouth which pumps out a thin paste flavored to taste exactly like whatever your favorite food was in elementary school. Not only is this an excellent means to feed you without you needing to leave your desk, it’s also an instant nostalgia trigger. Who wouldn’t want to chug a tube full of mash that tastes like burnt Bagel Bites and lukewarm apple juice?  Don’t get me started on paychecks. Those have to go too. Collecting a salary every two weeks might be the most old-fashioned part about working. Instead of paychecks, there will be a large take-a-penny-leave-a-penny bowl, but with hundred dollar bills instead of pennies. Take what you need and leave what you don’t need. This might be hard to fathom at first, but professional jealousy will become a thing of the past.  Lastly, we’re going to replace every single one of your co-workers with the cast of Nickelodeon’s classic sketch comedy series All That. Instead of Shirley who always leaves her leftover moussaka in the fridge for weeks and Danny from accounting who got drunk at the Christmas party and urinated on the copier, you’ll get to work side-by-side with Kenan, Kel and ... the other ones whose names I can’t bother to Google. The only cast member who might be hard to get is Amanda Bynes, but when I tell her that she doesn’t have to get out of bed and the break room is stocked with Fruit Roll-Ups, she’ll sign up immediately.  I can’t tell you how this program is going to be put into place, nor can I say that it is at all practical, but I can guarantee you that Mexico will pay for it. In the interim, allow me to apologize to the other generations of human beings on this planet for letting them down. Maybe if we all spent less time listening to Drake and DM’ing each other, we would have solved world hunger, stemmed the tide of global warming, and eradicated racism like our friends the baby boomers.
A profile about Mic painted a disturbing picture of an office run by millennials – and they didn’t know the half of it