A Conversation, Part II

So I was drifting along the fringe of this little conversation, mostly just waiting for it to be over and trying not to make it seem so, kinda enjoying the fact that I didn't have to join in much, when the other woman finally focused on me, and I'm pretty sure she only did so in a trying-to-be-nice way so I wouldn't feel excluded or so she could show how nice she is by showing interest in me, someone she'd probably never see again. Her question was so predictable that you might be amazed that at this point in my life I haven't ever bothered to create a stock answer for it.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.

What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.


1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.