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The middle-aged guide to fitting in with Gen Z work colleagues

IS everyone else on the video call younger and cooler than you? Did they not get your ‘computer says no’ gag? Hide your true age with these tips: 

Always call from your bedroom

Using your high-ceilinged living room with framed pictures insensitively advertises that you own a house. The mark of a true Zoomer is living and working in one small Peckham bedroom. Get in the box room, sponge on some damp and you’re just like them.

Never drink

When you were young you were always pissed, but not these kids. Rather than making you one of the gang, knocking back a few pints will age you instantly: young people don’t drink, unless from the unfeasibly large pastel water bottles that they carry everywhere.

Don’t share pre-2014 work anecdotes

Remember the sales manager who used to leer at the secretaries, and if you flashed him a bit of cleavage you could get the afternoon off? Never mention this: it will precede a horrified silence at the barbaric abuses of the past. The young cannot process the workplace as a location where you idly wondered which co-worker you would shag next.

Lead a political pressure group

Generation Z are all ridiculous overachievers, listing themselves of CEOs as non-profit groups with a social purpose and implying it’s society’s fault they’re not able to do it full-time. Meanwhile you like going to the cinema and socialising with friends. Not good enough.

Get the worst tattoo

You think your tattoo, a Chinese character on your thigh done in 1998 that you no longer remember the meaning of, is bad? Nah. Get a meme tattooed on your neck commemorating that time a YouTuber got their apology wrong. And act like that’s just fine.

Be on social media

You remember when Facebook launched and your boss called it ‘social notworking’. Not the young: they regard tweeting from the office as a basic human right. Enthusiastically join their conversations about their repressive, authoritarian workplace until you realise the person they’re calling #cornerseatStalin is you.

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Key component of slimming Mediterranean diet is chain-smoking

THE crucial element of the southern European diet that keeps natives so attractively thin is not olive oil or leafy vegetables but endless cigarettes. 

Proponents of the Mediterranean diet claim emulating Spanish and Italian consumption of legumes, seeds and fruit will help you get skinny, but researchers have found their ceaseless consumption of Marlboro Lights has more to do with it.

Dr Helen Archer explained: “Northern Europeans lusting after sexy, olive-skinned Mediterraneans in skimpy swimwear have always wondered what their secret is. Turns out it’s fags.

“We experimented with two groups. One who ate nothing but sardines and artichokes in olive oil. The other who ate whatever the f**k they wanted and smoked four packs a day.

“By week three, the smokers would slip effortlessly among the bathing beauties on a St Tropez beach, while the healthy eaters were more Margate than Montpellier.”

“Turns out it’s not visiting the vegetable aisle but going to the counter that sells the scratchcards that does the trick. You die early, sure, but you die thin so who gives a shit?”

Sophie Rodriguez of Seville said: “Duh. All of my friends back home eat nothing but kebabs. The difference is they eat them between inhaling Camel Blues.”

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