Old Farts

Do you refer to disabled people as crippled farts?
I very much doubt it.
How about people from other countries, are you okay with calling them foreign farts?
Probably not.
How about people of different religions, do say they are heathen farts?
I reckon not.
You don’t say Chinese farts, or black farts, or Jew farts, or spastic farts.
And you probably don’t refer to women as female farts.
No intelligent person would.
No one with any brains would group people according to a common feature and address them in a way that insults that entire group.
That’s called bigotry.
Isn’t it strange then that we’re perfectly happy to refer to a very large group of people as old farts?
We don’t discriminate on grounds of race, or colour, or sex, or  religion, or disability.
But it’s perfectly acceptable, even fashionable, to discriminate on grounds of age.
Older people are stupid, we all know that.
Without exception they’re slow and full of bad, outdated ideas.
They get in the way of young people.
Young people have more energy, more ideas, they’re more creative, more exciting.
Any young person is more worthwhile than any older person.
Look at the evidence.
In advertising agencies 45% of employees are under 30 and 5% are over 50.
So that’s nine times as many.
Actually it would probably be better to get rid of the old farts altogether.
Then the young people could get on with doing the brilliant work that we see all around us.
The daring, exciting, original, brave creative work.
Because, as we all know, young people are the only people capable of doing it.
If only old people wouldn’t keep getting in the way.
But hang on, there are nine times as many young people as old people in advertising now.
So who are some of those old farts getting in the way?
People like: Rosie Arnold, Paul Brazier, Trevor Beattie, Dave Dye, Mark Waites, Damon Collins, Kate Stanners, Helen Calcraft, Dave Droga, Sue Unerman, Graham Fink, Ed Morris.
No wonder all the young people can’t do any good work.
With all those old farts hanging around.
Nicky Bullard is very worried about this.
She just wrote to me about a talk she’s doing on the subject of ageism in our business.
Personally I was never interested in the exterior features of anyone in the creative dept.
Gender didn’t matter, or race, or social class, or education, or religion, or age.
None of that paid my mortgage.
None of that was what the public saw.
All they ever saw was the work, not who did it.
What paid my mortgage was the work.
So all I was ever interested in was the part that did the work.
People were just brains in a bell jar to me.
That’s why I preferred to see the ideas rather than have the teams present them.

That way, just like the public, I’d be judging the work not who did it.