Gotta hand it to Gen Z—their tech savviness and sarcastic humor is a potent combination for comedy. Add to that a blatant disregard for workplace decorum, and you’ve got a recipe for some grade A viral entertainment.
Mike Hege, a realtor at Pridemore Properties in North Carolina, recently learned this after asking the company’s 27-year-old video marketing manager to make a video for his Instagram and TikTok pages.
The employee did as asked, but took on some, shall we say…creative touches that Hege certainly didn’t expect.
As the phrase “Asked my Gen Z employee to edit a video for me, and this is what I got!” appears on screen, viewers witness a compilation video made entirely of Hege taking various inhales, presumably before going into whatever spiel he had intended to be recorded.
Essentially, this employee showcased the infamous “millennial pause” in action. Over and over again. She even threw in some awkward hair zhuzhing for good measure.
Watch:
Clearly this employee was onto something, because the video has already racked up a little over 4 million likes on Instagram. Several viewers suggested a raise was called for.
“Give her a raise because this 100% caught my attention far more then whatever you were going to say,” one person wrote.
Another added, ““Her audacity is so respectable tho.”
Of course, just type in “Letting Gen Z Edit My Videos” on TikTok, and you’ll see that Hege isn’t the only one giving his videos the Gen Z treatment.
Check out this one from the Goodwill of North Georgia. Poor fella giving the presentation made the mistake of saying “it’s okay, he’ll edit that out” after making a flub. It was, of course, not edited out.
@goodwill_ng We’ve definitely got things😊
“Gen Z is so unserious I love us,” one person commented.
There’s also this delightfully quirky one from the Poe Museum, home of “a wide variety of chairs”…where you’ll learn that “you can never have too many flat Edgars.”
@poemuseum We’ve got chairs at the Poe Museum! #edgarallanpoe #Richmond #poe #PoeMuseum ♬ original sound – The Poe Museum
“Gen Z in the workforce is my favorite thing about life,” a viewer wrote.
As for Hege and his employee, he told TODAY that his company wanted their social media presence to reflect “authenticity” and “humanity,” and that the Gen Z employee completely succeeded in her task.
“This was the editor’s way of showcasing that we’re real people and that we can have fun and be on the lighter side,” he said, adding that she’s been “crushing it” since her employment began in February. So maybe that raise isn’t so far off after all.