There are those of us who don’t think of pip as an annoying seed commonly found in tangerines at this time of year. We never confuse Dr Dos with an NHS employee and we can recall an escape sequence had nothing to do with jumping a BMW over a wire fence. For us, central heating was something porridge gave, especially as our bedroom windows froze on the inside. In hot weather, air conditioning meant flapping a piece of paper in front of our face. In other words, we are the old farts who grew up in a time when our Christmas stockings held a banana and a copy of the Eagle or Bunty annual if we were lucky.

Sex and drugs
More than likely, we are those who younger IT Pros sneer at for being out of touch, while at the same time envying our jobs and salaries. Present company excepted of course because I don’t have either. Yet, according to recent surveys, we are becoming the generation who are using the Internet the most. In fact, it is apparently our ageing parents who use it more than we do, from personal experience of our parents’ computer literacy I fail to understand that last part. Nevertheless, old farts have more time and more reason to use the ‘Net than youngsters who have other activities such as homework, boozing, drugs and romance to sideline web browsing. And that’s just the junior school kids.
We, on the other hand, hang-out at on-line shopping sites, spending any potential inheritance our off-spring thought they would get. Just wait until we start on the house’s equity, that’ll end their dreams of easy living when we go. Especially when they see our final few pennies go to pay nursing home fees. Courier delivery trucks become regular and welcome visitors, bringing on-line shopping: gym equipment, bags of manure, latest iPods and cases of wine. And as old farts are normally at home, there’s seldom any problem about someone being in to received the goodies.

10 more years
So why is it that when web sites have forms with fields requiring our age, the drop-down list is in 10-year brackets that end at 64? It’s a good few years before I reach that age but after my next birthday I will move into a new 10-year bracket disconcertingly close to the end of the list. For forms with a scrolling list with years of birth, it takes an awfully long time to scroll to ‘our’ end where our birth years are in danger of dropping off the bottom.
What happens after we reach 64 or discover our birth year isn’t there? Many of the forms insist that all fields are completed and will not let you pass a shopping trolley to the check-out until it is. Luckily my (not) much younger wife has told me the solution. Typically, it’s the sort of reasoning it takes the gender difference to come up with, males would probably never thought of it.
We become 21 again. Problem solved.