On June 28th, movie audiences and lovers of The Beatles will finally get a chance to view the long-awaited release of Yesterday, a film which has been teased relentlessly in emotion-stirring trailers over the past few months. Yesterday tells the story of a struggling singer-songwriter who wakes up one day to find that he’s the only person on Earth who remembers The Beatles. And, in case you’ve been living under a rock, you can watch the trailer here…
A lot of people are very excited about this film, including this guy Jason in our office. We take a lot of pride in our track record of hiring the freshest young talent here at The Lemon, but Jason is proof that we’re also willing to blow the dust off some musty old talent, as well. Not that it comes without its challenges. From hapless 1980’s pop culture references to endless stories about how he had the best summer of his life at 19 (when most of us were either potty training or being born) to the difficulty he had learning how to AirDrop a file, or simply his tendency to shake a fist at the sky, yelling “Millennials!” Jason’s a lot to take in. But, we’re an equal opportunity employer, so…
Anyway, he’s our co-worker, and he means no harm; plus, we’ve gotten very good at establishing a sort of telepathic short-hand when it comes to group interaction. Usually, it inspires sort of a group nod or enthusiastic response to assure him that he’s welcome here. But the other day, we were all doing shots of Fireball in the game room, listening to the new Marshmello/A Day to Remember collab and talking about the first cars we ever bought (purchases which, for the most part, had been made in the years since 2010). When in walked Jason, nodding his head to the music, as old people do when they’re trying desperately to relate. Making use of a brief pause in the exchange, he chimed in, “Get this… The first car I ever bought on my own was a green 1995 Dodge Stratus.”
Now, what happened next is not necessarily something that we’re proud of but, in the interest of transparency, we’re going to own up to our behavior. Remember that ‘telepathic short-hand’ we talked about? Well, within a split second of Jason’s statement, we all decided to feign as much interest as possible by allowing him the opportunity to elaborate on the Dodge Stratus. This was, of course, easy because we had no idea what a ‘Dodge Stratus’ was.
“What do you mean, you’ve never heard of a Dodge Stratus?” He asked incredulously, almost as if he genuinely believed the vehicle to be iconic, and that everyone (regardless of age) should know what he was talking about.
To be honest, we were all a little surprised at how quickly the conversation began to escalate. He began frantically describing the Stratus in great detail, talking about how it was one of the models that launched ‘cab forward design’ (whatever that is) and seemed to be surprised that we’d never heard of the ‘Intrepid’ or the ‘Avenger’ either. He started drawing pictures on a napkin, and we were sitting there wondering why he didn’t just Google it (but you know how old people are… Just the worst). It was clearly painful for him, realizing that he had woken up in a world where – for all intents and purposes, the Dodge Stratus had never existed. Exhausted, and in need of a good ‘Just For Men’ shellacking, the broken 41-year old never looked so old.
Looking back, it was probably a wonderful team-building exercise. Plus, it inspired Jason to take some personal time, in which he’s probably going to schedule a colonoscopy since – at his age – that sort of thing is important.
#FightColorRectalCancer
But that Marshmello/ADTR track is fire. Check it out here.
