I recently gave a lecture during which I showed the audience the three generations of cellphones which I have owned.

The first is a Nokia 2210, which is about the size of a medium bar of chocolate. It is fairly weighty but it worked quite well. The second- generation cellphone is also a Nokia, but it is much smaller, about the size of a small remote control. The third cellphone I own is a Samsung smartphone and it is considerably larger than its predecessor, the small Nokia. It can do a whole lot of other things – accessing the Internet, taking photographs, accessing Facebook and Twitter and a thousand apps you can use, and so on.

I was finally pushed into getting one of these because I was told that I looked very old-fashioned with my other Nokia. Fashion has never been high up on an engineer’s list of priorities, but I figured, from an engineering point of view, that it would be handy to have a cellphone that takes a decent photograph instead of having to take a camera with you wherever you went.

Anyway, I got the new cellphone and I discovered a number of things about it that I really did not like. Firstly, it is very difficult to operate it one-handed as I have to do when driving (even with a hands-free kit). It whips unexpectedly from screen to screen.

After a few weeks of using the Samsung Galaxy S4, I am afraid, I am back on track with the Nokia. The younger engineers around me laugh behind my back because I do not have a smartphone but, if my Nokia is simpler, why not stick to it?

It is a generation thing. I belong to the generation of the ‘baby boomers’. The generation of engineers and technicians in my office are all of Generation Y. They do not want the ‘old, tried and trusted’ but the ‘new, fun and exciting’.

I feel very sorry for Generation Y youngsters because, apart from thinking that to be able to operate a smartphone is a rare accomplishment, they really do not know how tough life is going to be out there and how hard they should be working. They spend much of their time on Facebook and Twitter and loading music and apps, and not enough time actually working. They have not quite grasped (those of European descent) that they are not particularly special and that hard work does have its reward, but you do have to do it and that hard work is not just to come to work on time and leave work on time. That is not hard work – it is swopping time for money. The difficulty is that the Generation Y youngsters see what I have and what their parents have and they feel that, as long as they stick around long enough, they will be rewarded in the same sort of way with the same sort of trappings of wealth, accommodation, possessions and pension fund as their fathers and mothers have.

What they do not grasp (in this country, anyway) is that my generation all benefited from the fact that whites were given special privileges and there were many employment positions not occupied by blacks in the 1970s and 1980s, since blacks were not trained or allowed to occupy these positions.

But the field is now wide open – in fact, competition from all races is fierce and due to black economic-empowerment policies being baised in favour of blacks. Thus, people under 30 have expectations which, unless they start working really hard, are not going to be met – hopes which will not be fulfilled and dreams that will not be realised. If you are reading this and you belong to Generation Y and of European descent, I suggest you sit down and think very carefully about this whole matter.

I can tell you one thing – start working a great deal harder than you are working now because everybody else is working harder than you. See smartphones as fun but not as work. Especially you, young engineers.