Perhaps I'm being mean, or just a has-been, but after working with a lot of young people below the age of 25, I am tempted to call them the "distracted generation".

Yeah, yeah, at 46 years of age I am just the old fogie bad-mouthing the younger generation.

But it's a common, but not yet dominant trait I notice more and more.

A lot of youths are wandering around plugged in to gadgets such as cell phones and portable digital music players, seemingly oblivious to the world, and needing a constant stream of music, information and a connection to their friends or anonymous "community".

When I was a high school student during the 1970s, we were just getting over another type of "plugged-in" generation, one that was full of protests and marches.

Back then everyone considered themselves engaged in the battle for more rights, and less intrusive corporate and political power.

But now we seem to have reached a kind of calm, a social inertia symbolised for me in the way the very young and the not-so-young seem to be locked into their own world.

They are plugged in to a portable music player on their way to work or school, or they are talking on the cell phone, unconnected to the street or to meeting anyone else.

How do you socially connect to someone whose head is bobbing up and down spasmodically?

Many tend to do the same at work if they are tolerated, lifting their headphones off their ears only to ask a colleague to repeat what they were trying to communicate.

Some workplaces actually allow this kind of behaviour to occur.

Some managers have just given up because the majority are doing it.

This distraction is also embodied in the incredible amounts of digital photos being taken and shared amongst themselves.

Incredibly each batch of photos taken over the weekend or the night before, looks, well, like the ones before.

There are often endless variations of "Here I am with Jane, and there is Jane with Bob, and boy, what were you drinking there?"

You get the picture (I have sometimes called my younger colleagues the 3M generation, as in "Me, me, me", one overly fascinated with publishing themselves all over the net.)

Perhaps I should be kinder and call it a "connected" generation.

But what are they connected to?

I know this rant is all generalisation.

But I believe it captures part of the trend, or group. What do you think?

Send your views to the email address below. I'm sure to debate it with you.

P.S. Over the last week I have been walking to work completely plugged in to the rock 'n' roll via the portable radio on my cellphone.

One just floats to work. I'm not getting older, just younger in my ways.

***

Most of us have at one time or another know of a work colleague who is an obsessive hoarder of documents.

They reason wrongly that since information is power, the more they do not pro-actively share with their workmates, the more they are in a better pecking position.

Unfortunately, such a blocker of information is a blow to team building and getting work done.

A new survey commissioned by Tower Software suggests that middle managers, aged 45 and up, are the most habitual hoarders of documents, files and e-mail that they are meant to be sharing with their colleagues.

The survey found that 88 percent of employees at middle manager or below need to share computer files with co-workers.

But 62 per cent of middle managers say they store such data in places other than a shared computer network, and 59 percent say they store such files in multiple locations.

That statistic is double the percentage of administration staff who say they follow the same practices.

About 17 of respondents to the survey claimed they followed such practices because they do not want people interfering with the files.

About 63 percent of those aged 45 and up said they stored files in a particular way out of habit and 20 percent said they were concerned with protecting their creative ideas from competitive colleagues.

"This practice by 'older' employees seems to present problems for their younger colleagues too," Tower concludes.

About 75 percent of those aged 34 or less find themselves unable to locate the current version of a computer file that colleagues have been working on, compared to 38 percent of those aged 45 and above.

The practice also hurts those who have to do the job if the hoarder is absent for any reason.

Tower has come up with a label for the middle manager above 45 who is hoarding files. The "Fox" is habitual, and mindful of organisational politics and potential threats to his or her success.

The "fox" is "wise and devious with his work", says Tower.

Tower says the research supports the company's experience in implementing what is known in the business as electronic document and records management projects, a means for a business to track its stored data.

"This research supports our long-held belief that all EDRM projects are 20 percent concerned with technology and 80 percent about organisational culture and people," Tower concludes.

It's not the software, stupid (at least that's what IT will tell you).

Send your comments on the young and the old to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.