A few weeks ago, I was attending an educational conference. I was at a lunch table chatting with the attendees. I overheard a guy telling this story to his colleagues:

“So there I was, struggling to make PowerPoint display correctly on this projector. I restarted it. I went through the menus. Nothing was working. So this eighth grader comes up and says, ‘Mr. Summers, let me help you.’ He kneels down, fiddles around, and damned if he didn’t fix the thing! An eighth grader!”

And he shook his head in amazement.

I was amazed, too. Not that an eighth grader proved to be more technically proficient than his teacher — but that anybody would find this story noteworthy.

I mean, is anybody even surprised anymore when a child is more comfortable with some technology than his parents? That old chestnut, “Oh, I’ll just have my kid explain it to me,” isn’t that 30 years old by now? Maybe I’m just jaded because I spend my time in tech circles, but isn’t that joke so worn out, it’s just not that hilarious anymore?

I suppose every idea is new to everybody at some point. But it felt to me as though I was hearing somebody say, “Can you imagine? They sent a man to the moon!” Yes, yes, that’s amazing. It’s just not news.

I remember thinking: It’s too bad there’s no List of Things That Were Once Amazing, but Are Really Kind of Old News at This Point. It would be a handy clip-and-save document that you could review, perhaps to avoid unwittingly embarrassing yourself at the next cocktail party. It might go something like this:

1. Kids Adapt to New Technologies Faster. It’s not just technology — it’s anything. Children also learn new languages faster than adults. They pick up new skills of all kinds faster. And that includes adapting to new technologies.

Those of us in middle age grew up in a world without the Internet, without cellphones, without digital cameras. But anyone entering college this fall has never known a world without these things; they’ve grown up online. It’s really not surprising that they take to new technologies faster than their parents.

2. Consumer Technology Turns Over Quickly. Please don’t make a big thing about how the gadget you bought only a few months ago is already obsolete. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; it’s how the industry works. In fact, rapid turnover is the entire business model of the electronics industry. You should know that going in. When you buy a gadget, you should already expect that it will no longer be on the market a year from now.

Note that I said “no longer be on the market” — not “obsolete.” Just because a product is no longer sold doesn’t mean it’s not useful anymore.

3. Operating Systems Turn Over, Too. Every week, some unhappy reader e-mails me to complain that Apple or Microsoft or Google has updated Software Product X, and that therefore his or her four-year-old Product Y no longer works.

Agreed: It’s a bummer. But this, too, is part of the game you’ve signed up to play. Big software companies make a reasonable effort to remain backward-compatible. But after a few years of progress on Mac OS X or Windows or whatever, devoting the resources and manpower to that task, all for the sake of a dwindling number of holdouts from the late ’90s, is no longer worth it.

You can either remain frozen in time with your older computer/operating system/software combo, or you can upgrade and go with the flow.

4. Printer Ink Is Expensive. “I spend more on inkjet cartridges every year than I spent on the printer itself!!”

You’re right. It’s true. It’s a ripoff. It’s appalling. It’s the give-away-the-razors, sell-the-razor-blades business model.

It’s just the way the world works, and you don’t have any great alternatives. File this one under “first world problems.”

5. The License Agreements Are Overreaching. Every time there’s a new product, somebody winds up reading the EULA and reacting badly. The EULA is the End User Licensing Agreement — that scrolling page of legalese that appears when you install a new piece of software or sign up for a new Web service.

These documents often contain astonishing language along the lines of this, from the original Google Chrome browser EULA: “By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

It certainly does sound appalling. And I really have no idea what the lawyers really mean by that.

At the same time, there’s never yet been a case where this “ownership” amounted to anything. Google never published a book, for example, based on stuff its customers have written on their blogs.

Google wound up taking that language out of its Chrome EULA, but you’ll find similar clauses in the licensing agreements for all kinds of other software and service products. Spend enough time in this business, and you eventually realize that it’s boilerplate lawyer talk meant to protect the company from this lawsuit or that — not an actual threat that the company will co-opt your writings and try to profit from them.

There are plenty of other strange-but-true examples in the tech world, but here’s hoping that these five will at least get you started getting your brain around these no-longer-new shockers.

In other news, I just heard that China has surpassed the United States in high-tech manufacturing. Can you believe!?