No longer the butt of Kitty Flanagan's jokes

Sunday Blog 226 - 15th March 2026

As the youngest in my family, I am the only Gen-Xer in a sea of Boomers. I take some pride in that. After all, having suffered for all those years being the smallest, weakest and slowest, I am now basking in the smugness of being the youngest and trendiest of my siblings.

So imagine my horror to find myself the butt of Kitty Flanagan’s

jokes about how to spot a Gen-Xer. It’s obvious because we use book-like phone covers, with actual credit cards stored in the fly leaf of the book-like cover, if you will. (See pink phone case above, now off to its new home on the Buy and Sell group.)

Some time ago I did put my digital credit cards in my iPhone wallet, but I found my fingers tripping and fumbling at the cash register when trying to tap and go. So I’d regressed back to using the actual credit card. Because they were sitting there, right in that age-defining, Gen-X pink phone case.

After watching Kitty’s skit, I looked around me, and sure enough, I could see a demarcation line between women my age who were keeping up with the techy trends, with just a phone cover on the back of the phone, and those book-phone nerds like myself who were falling behind.

This failure ate away at me. Onto my lengthy to-do list it went “purchase a new phone case asap.”

I started practicing my tap and go, and planned to get a new, clear phone cover. My magnificent yellow phone had been cloaked in a pink phone cover which both aged me and occluded the buttercup tones of my device. But I wasn’t completely stupid and vowed to get a screen cover so my exposed phone screen would survive the transition from the pink book.

“Would you like another screen cover on top of the one you’ve already got?” the man at one of those phone shops in the middle of the shopping centre aisle asked.

Doh. “Um, no thanks.”

“Would like plain or sparkly?”

“Sparkly. Definitely sparkly.”

So I’m back in the tech game for the next six seconds at least, no more the butt of Kitty Flanagan’s jokes.