Avoiding Job Status Q With Fudge

To be freed from the “Status Star Wars” & be “wonderfully” yourself in any business or social setting, maybe try NOT playing the game by deflecting the inevitable boorish Q, “What do you do for a living?

Recall Wally’s observation in “My Dinner With Andre,” in which the frustrated playwright relates how people at a dinner party will inevitably react negatively when they learn his girlfriend, Debbie, “works as a waitress three nights a week.” Moreover, as the WSJ article says, “In countless moments far from the office, many of us are still our jobs first … A marketing professional … was asked what she did while high above the trees on a ziplining course, strapped into a harness. What would happen if we didn’t lead with our professional selves?”

Says one John Levy, who hosts a dinner series where guests aren’t allowed to reveal what they do for 90 minutes: “Upon arrival, some jittery diners avoid the wine and lapse into banal conversations about, say, the spelling of their names.” But, by the end, he says, the group is like a “gang of old camp friends” … bonded by the shared vulnerability of completing a task together – they prepare dinner – “and the fact that they can’t devolve into the rote what-do-you-do script they have been honing for years.” Maybe that’ll work for some. For others wanting to avoid Wally’s familiar cringe at finding out what you do for a living, the story suggests, it’s either somehow deflect with a clever banal witticism, or, just be honest and say “It’s none of your F****** business.”

Davd Soul