What would Andy say...?

I work in a long row of Cubes with some mildly obnoxious people who like to talk over the walls. The thing is they don’t usually stand up to face one another to talk over the walls, they just sit in their chairs and yell at one another over the walls. Their conversations are usually not funny, but they find themselves hilarious.

Thankfully, and I wear headphones to drown out their conversations.

A few weeks ago when Andy Rooney died there were some poor impersonations of him being bantered about. When one of the younger (and really loud) women proudly stated that she had no idea who Andy Rooney was. This caught my attention and I took my headphones off.

How can you not know who Andy Rooney is? Did your parents never watch 60 minutes as you grew up? Did you just gloss over and dismiss any Saturday Night Live impression as unique character with big eyebrows? And I suppose it’s not so much that she didn’t know who Andy Rooney is/was, but that she was a little cocky about it. However I’m sure she could name all the idiots on Jersey Shore or in the Kardashian Klan…

The more I’ve been thinking about it, the more frustrated I get. What do I have to do so that my daughter grows up knowing who Andy Rooney is. How do I make her aware of things that came before her, aware of things outside her immediate world…I want her to know that Jimmy Stewart was in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I want her to know that the movie “Footloose” was not made in 2011. To let her know that she had two great-grandfathers who were a part of history in WWII.

What do I need to do so that when she is the young lady in the office, no one thinks of her as the young ego-centric one. Funny thing is, I bet Andy Rooney would have something profound to say about this…