I find myself one of about a dozen dudes my age or older just chatting and drinking McD’s coffee and stuff. These guys can barely walk, their bodies worn out clearly from working the land all their lives. The women working the counter all know them and say, “have a seat with your friends” with a grin. This is clearly a regular occurance. It seems all the old farmer dudes congregate at the McDonald’s and just shoot the breeze about whatever crosses their mind. The conversations are as random as they are interesting and insightful.
Me, I’m an anomaly. I’m wearing Patagonia with sandals instead of Wrangler with work shoes. I have a bunch of new-fangled technology, and when I raise my hand when the woman asks, “who needs a refill of coffee” she makes a slightly confused face when looking at me as if to politely ask with her eyes, “Who the heck are you?”
I’m logged into work downloading source code, updating PRs, and preparing for Kubernetes application migrations, all things that would be more confusing than a foreign language to my coffee-drinking McDonald’s peers, not because they couldn’t understand it, but because they never learned it. Make no mistake, those who master the agricultural sciences are not slow or stupid by any measure. They have simply applied their intelligence points into a different skills tree. Mention “putting something into a cloud” to them and they would likely laugh out loud at just how silly that sounds to them, and they probably should, it is silly.
These guys are hear every day, or at least on the same day every week. They talk to one another face to face. They put an arm around each other when they see each other. They are the village elders coming together to share antectodes and wisdom in their way, at McDonald’s, ba da bum ba da, I’m lovin’ it.