It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving and I was exhausted. I had been up since 5:00 a.m. because I had (foolishly) volunteered to drive my sister and her family to the airport in time to make their 7:30 flight back to Phoenix. And instead of just going back to my hotel and getting a couple more hours of sleep (after a long night of drinking the night before), I decided to swing by my parents' house and see if anyone was up. Sure enough, my parents were both up, and we started chatting and cleaning up from the festivities of the past few days and before I knew it I had to hurry back to the hotel so I could check out on time and then begin my six-hour drive home.
I could have flown – it's only about a 75-minute flight from the city where I grew up to where I have lived for the past 27 years – but the crowded airports would add at least three hours to the experience. I preferred the extra couple hours of travel time – spent in the solitude of my SUV with the company of podcasts – to the aggravation of the crowded and dirty airports.
I got home at about 7:30 p.m., just in time to take a quick shower and go to meet my friends Karen and Sophie at a slightly upscale Italian restaurant for dinner. You're probably wondering how it is that a guy my age was friends with two women roughly half my age. Well I'll tell you.
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Two or three years out of college I got a slightly above entry-level job at the local office of a large and prestigious business consulting firm. And I worked there for a very long time and rose through the ranks probably a little faster than most. Even though I was very good at my job, I never completely fit in at that firm because, quite simply, I am not an asshole. I knew going in that the place had a reputation of being a den of jerks, but it was a resume builder that would eventually permit me the opportunity to quit and open my own firm.
I had worked there about fifteen years when Karen got a job there working in the mailroom. She was a high school student at the time, and she got the job because her aunt was one of the office managers. This firm always used high-school and college kids for the mailroom and they were usually the children of senior associates or shareholders in the firm. The job was pretty easy, and the prestige of the firm's name made it look better on a resume or college application than the complexity of the job warranted.
But because Karen was related to an administrative employee rather than "professional," she seemed to be treated a little worse than the other mailroom staff. That's how big of assholes the rank and file employees of that firm were. As I mentioned, I am not an asshole. So I treated Karen with respect and was friendly towards her in a non-condescending way. And over the time that she was working there she and I became friends. She would always bring me my mail last so that we could chat for a while when she stopped by my office. She would ask my advice on everything from homework to college applications to why high school boys are such idiots. I looked forward to our daily chats.
Eventually Karen graduated and went off to college. She went to a public university a couple of states away – one of the colleges that she and I discussed multiple times before she applied, and she only applied after I said it was a good fit for her. As it turned out, one of my clients had its main office in the city where her college was located, and I had to travel there on business about five or six times a year. So almost every time I made that trip, I would make time to have lunch or dinner or just drinks with her.
It was over the course of these trips that I noticed Karen had grown up. She'd gone from being a gangly, awkward kid to being quite the attractive young woman. She was (and still is) tall with long strawberry blonde hair, green eyes, freckles, C-cup breasts and a nice round ass. I had little doubt she was a distraction to multiple guys in her classes.
It was also on these trips that I first met Karen's friend Sophie. Sophie is almost the opposite of Karen as far as looks go. Sophie is short, with dark hair, light-brown eyes, A-cup breasts, and an ass that some people would say is slightly large but I always thought that it suited her well. The best word to describe Sophie is "cute." She is cute both in looks and in personality. She has a mix of naivete and worldliness that brings a refreshing viewpoint to pretty much any conversation.
During Karen's junior year of college, I quit my job and opened my own firm, which had been my plan since about the time I started that job. My client in that college town liked my work so well that they remained my client even after I'd started my own firm, so my business trips continued, and I saw Karen and Sophie on every trip.
After they graduated, Karen moved back home and got a state job in public health. Our schedules did not mesh well, but we still managed to have lunch or dinner once a month. Sophie, who had grown up in the city where the college was located, stayed there and got a job in the arts, helping to plan exhibits, concerts, plays, and the like in public-owned spaces.
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So that's how I know them. On the night of our story, Sophie was in town to spend the holiday with Karen and her family. (Sophie's parents had been able to book a really nice Mediterranean vacation, but to get the best price they had to travel the week of Thanksgiving. So Sophie had celebrated her "family Thanksgiving" a week early.) I arrived at the restaurant first and was waiting in the bar area when Karen and Sophie showed up. Both were wearing tight black skirts, Karen with a red button-up blouse and Sophie with a black turtleneck. We exchanged hello hugs and sat down.
Almost immediately I informed them that I would have to make an early night of it because I had been up since 5:00 and had not had much sleep the night before. Karen and Sophie were fully in support of that plan – it seems that they had been at a club until two o'clock the night before and then decided to split a bottle of wine after getting back to Karen's apartment. So they were looking forward to getting to bed early, too. The place was very crowded so we grabbed a menu from the bartender so we could order as soon as we were seated. The hostess found us just a few minutes later and escorted us to our table. It was a square table for four. Sophie sat to my left and Karen across from me.
Our server came over and introduced herself as Doris. She was young, probably 19 or 20, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Here loosely fitting white blouse seemed to cover an attractive figure and her black pants definitely let me know that she had a nice ass. I thought her name was sort of funny because she was so young and "Doris" seems like a name that hasn't been used in a couple generations or more. But I kept that thought to myself (until now).
I got the distinct impression that Doris was new to the job. She stumbled over her introduction, mispronounced at least two words when describing the day's specials, and she offered merlot as an option when Sophie asked what types of white wine they had. But serving can be a hard job and I admired the way she seemed to be trying so hard.
We ordered our food and Sophie ordered a glass of chardonnay and I ordered some craft beer I had never tried before. Karen just ordered water because she was on-call for work. She was being groomed for a management position at the Department of Public Health and that involved working four-month stints at various positions within the department. Her current assignment was working as a 9-1-1 operator. That involved working twelve-hour shifts, but she only worked three days a week. And, of course, she had really great stories about work. Karen ensured us that there was almost no chance that she would be called in that night because in the three months she had been working in that position no on-call employee had ever been called in for any shift.
We started chatting and getting caught up when Sophie asked me "Why is it that your generation and the baby boomers are always making fun of us millennials?"
I was aware of the myriad of jokes about millennials that filled the internet and were bandied about at work, but, frankly, I never paid any attention to them. Probably because the only two millennials I actually knew were Karen and Sophie, who seemed to me to be normal, intelligent adults. So I said that I had no idea. To which Sophie replied, "Well what is different about your generation than ours do you think?"
I thought for a moment and then remembered a conversation I overheard at a bar about six months earlier between two women who, from what I gathered, had kids who were seniors in high school. So I asked Karen and Sophie if they had gone to their senior proms, and both responded that they had.
"Who did you go with Karen?" I asked.
"Let's see, as I recall it was my friends Ann, Kristin, Tommy, Jeff, and Beth."
"Okay, who did you go with, Sophie?"
"Gosh a bunch of people. Like eight or so? I'd have to think a while to remember them all."
"Well, that's one big difference, as I understand it," I said. "When I was in high school and college, we actually dated and didn't just go out with a group of people. We had girlfriends and boyfriends and people went out on dates with just one significant other person."
"We do that, too," said Karen.
"When was the first time you went out on a date with just one other person?" I inquired.
"Mmmmm, I guess not until my sophomore year of college. Second semester."
"And you, Sophie?" I asked.
"College. Junior year," she said almost as if she was making a confession.
