What makes an intrusive busybody? Or: how familiar do you get?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I bartend, and when I’m at work lots of people say, “Is this your only job?”

And when I say yes, it is, they tend to wonder aloud how I manage to pay the bills.

I find this rude and intrusive. I don’t see how people who work for minimum-wage pay their bills, but I certainly don’t ask them. I also think people underestimate the amount of money bartenders make. Which works to my advantage. But I still think asking people how they pay the bills is horribly rude.

I generally smile and shrug and say, “You might be surprised!”

I don’t mind discussing relatively personal stuff with relative strangers–one could almost say it’s part of my job–but money seems off-limits to me.

22

If this isn’t too, uh, personal… where do you draw the line between your “public life” and “personal life”?

23

I had no “public life” until a few months ago – though I did have a “professional life”. In my professional life, personal questions rarely came up – except as they related to my knowledge and or skills. Some of those were aquired through my personal interests, but no one really cared why I knew what I knew, only what I knew or didn’t know how to do.

Even my new “public life”, I’ve had very few personal questions besides a few basics ones like how old are you, what do you do for a living, etc.

I got into somewhat of an arguement with the guy who runs the Bulwer-Lytton contest. I told him that I planned to turn down all requests for interviews and photographs because I didn’t want strangers walking up and introducing themselves. He convinced me it would never happen – he had been interviewed and appeared on the media just about every year for the last 25 related to this contest, and in all that time no one ever recognized him on the street. I should have taken into account that he was in CA and I’m in WI – it’s happened a bunch of times to me since I appeared on all the local news programs. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I’m glad memories are fading – is hasn’t happened in at least a couple of months. Oh, and there was a picture distributed by AP that makes me look like a child molester waiting in the shadows – if I win again I’m going to get pictures taken by someone I know, and choose myself what goes out.