I don’t know, my dad is a high-level administrator at a Big Ten school and he is one of the most interesting guys I know, and I’d be saying that even if he wasn’t my dad. He is one very charismatic, almost flamboyant character, the type of guy you never forget, and he has enough stories for a lifetime. But he’s atypical of his profession - by his own admission - and he doesn’t really like his job. He is in it, at this point, for the money.
I’ve met a few really interesting exceptions to this (my boss in particular) but by and large this is true. Engineers aren’t just boring; they’re painfully boring, to a point that they could out-bore a dentist who moonlights as an accountant. Sure, I like to discuss the ins and outs of threaded fastener application, finite element analysis codes, and vehicle dynamics, but even within technical areas engineers typically have very limited interests. Try to talk about the implications of thermodynamics or quantum entanglement and you’ll get a blank stare, and if you go afield to talk about anything outside of work but sports, video games, and conservative politics you’ll break the unspoken code of the engineer. Never mind literature except for mostly crap science fiction and Dale Brown technoporn, or cinema below the level of $100M blockbusters and bad Chevy Chase movies.
The only thing worse are Air Force officers, who never seem to have any stories worth telling but tell them anyway. Army, Navy, Marine, Coasties, they all seem to have had interesting (or at least amusing) experiences at some point, but the Air Force guys are as dull as flat tan paint, and that’s the pilots. Based upon their dullness and lack of verbal ability I think the non-pilot career officers are drawn from the ranks of the undead.
This is what drove me out of skydiving. Well, that and having to go up jammed nose to arse in a rickety old DHC-2. (It wasn’t the jumping out that caused anxiety, it was the fifteen minutes I had to spend crammed up like a herring in a can.) Scuba divers are just as bad; I can predict with almost perfect certainty any discussion between two newly-introduced divers to about three decimal places, and hardcore sea kayakers, surfers, and marathon runners aren’t much better. It’s nice to have an obsessive passion, but you don’t need to bring it into every conversation, ya know?
Stranger
Truer words were never spoken. Those dudes can make a trip to WalMart into a comedic drama of epic proportions - complete with sound effects. I think this is the secret reason why my husband won’t retire- he’d miss his buddies and all that storytelling.
I work in the theater and have met lots and lots of interesting people in my field. I would put artists near the top of the “most interesting” list.
Except maybe for political discussion - we all tend to be pretty liberal so conversations about that are fairly predictable.
I’ve always found your run-of-the-mill presentation-giving, meeting-scheduling, conference-attending generic business executive to be rather dull. I deliver pizza to their tidy McMansions all the time. They generally tip well, but they all seem like they’re this close to going postal from the sheer mundanity (is that a word?) of their existence.
Slightly tangential, but in my long and varied career, I’ve observed that people in lines of work like making stuff that kills people are cooler and more laid back than people in lines of work that are considered nobler, like non-profits and some government agencies, whom I’ve found to be shitty backbiters as often as not.
Nah, plenty of shitty backbiters in the world of killing machines, too. They just don’t have to pretend to love humanity and all that, so it doesn’t seem quite as discordant.
Stranger
Ven Diagramming the Lawyers:
Smart Jocks aka SJ
Outliers aka O = including but not limited to, socialists, high functioning autistics, people with a sense of humour, the multiple tattooed, religious, extremes (extreme liberals or extreme conservatives), habitual drug users who only eat turkey sandwiches and bike around everywhere to avoid being caught in a car with a baggie, people who want to help other people and shit like that
Pasty Dudes Who Weren’t So Popular/Middling Popularity in High School now Seizing Chance to Find Moderately Hot Trophy Wife and are Very Bitter about Pretty Much Everything aka PD
SJ-O: run track or frequent marathonners (Science/Engineers gone Lawyer)
SJ-PD: JV sports, obsessed with darts, most gunners (Most Boring)
PD-O: Indie/Hipster identification (Most Interesting, Most Neurotic)
SJ-O-PD: Personality Disorders who like to work out
You really get a good idea of the day-to-day goings-on of these people as you hand them a pizza? I’d be willing to bet they know more about your job than you do about theirs.
Yeah; that’s one of those bias thingies, isn’t it?
But seriously, I have worked in DC for years, as a consultant for 4 different government agencies, and I’ve been just astounded at how some of the Government employees, essentially set for life with light duty, good pay and benefits, can be so pissy, petty, rude, mean and anal.
It’s like if you remove the “I could lose my job tomorrow” factor and they have to find something to be shitty about. I don’t get it. If I was set for life like that, I’d be skipping down the hallway going “zippety doo dah” every day and thanking the Lord for my good fortune and security. They must somehow weed out potential hires that would be happy with their situation or something.
**HeyHomie ** is correct (but mostly by accident, it’s not like he could know anything about them from delivering their pizzas).
I don’t think it matters if you are a lawyer, banker, consultant or just in some indescribable group in some large corporation. I won’t bore you with the details, but there seems to be a clear path that starts with “fun and eager young go-getter right out of college” and ends with “boring middle aged guy working in crappy job he hates”.
A bunch of young guys living in a craphole walk up on the Upper East Side going out drinking and scamming for girls every night they don’t have to work late at their law firm, consulting firm or investment bank is fun and interesting. The same guys fast forward 15 years as married, middle aged guys with kids living in a McMansion out on Long Island isn’t particularly interesting.
You’ve essentially just described every white-collar worker in the world. I think people have this idea in their head of the “generic businessman”, when they really have no clue about the diversity of people and work contained within the “business world”.
I think what most people are describing is the generic, cubicle dwelling middle income paying incomprehensibly nondescript unglamorous functionary jobs people see in media like Dilbert, Office Space and The Office. Jobs that have titles like Director of Accounts Payable or Marketing Operations Coordinator.
I’d have to agree that the trades are one of the last bastions of interesting folk. A couple theories as to why.
1)We don’t have to be politically correct. When at a jobsite, you can talk about a “dirty Sanchez,” and no one is going to report you. We can swear, make rude gestures, and insult at whim. Swearing, gestures, and insults always make stories more interesting.
2)There isn’t a ton of women, and as we all know, women are humorless and uptight. See #1.
3)There isn’t a lot of posturing, bureaucracy, or rank.
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We are all crooks. Crooks are interesting.
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Homeowners are crazy, and make for some damn good stories.
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You have a wide variety of backgrounds and skills. At any jobsite there are several different trades at any given time.
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We all must get along and work together to complete the job. This tends to weed out the socially incompetent.
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We actually have to work, and like singing is to the slaves, storytelling is to the trades.
It’s a figment of most folks’ imagination. There is nothing “generic” about accounting, and marketing can be extremely interesting.
To you, maybe. To me, nothing is duller than listening to young blowhard males brag about how much women and booze they consume.
Not to mention the fact that it describes about 50% of all young lawyers, investment bankers & consultants I’ve ever known.
Not really a profession except for a select few but I find that gamblers (racing and sports betting types) are invariably interesting people. I think it is because of a combination of things:
They are really opinionated and happy to state a position because every bet you have is based on you thinking you are right and that the odds are in your favour. If you don’t have an opinion then you don’t have a bet.
They can argue a position without rancour because the result of the race/contest will prove who is right or wrong.
They can accept being wrong because even the most successful gamblers lose bets all the time.
Yeah, pay attention the next time you’re in a fancy restaurant. The ladies on the receiving end of blowhardery from those 29-year-old bankers, lawyers, etc. are far from fascinated. I can’t imagine the chicks getting catcalls and dirty juanita jokes at Denny’s are particularly amused, either, and not because they’re uptight.
Here’s your answer, from a Navy brat who grew up in DC and had both parents working in the Pentagon in the most literal sense of the phrase: they have to justify their existence. They can’t get fired, but their department can get downsized or wiped out by budget cuts. If they make everything they do as difficult as possible, more employees have to do more work and more “customers” have to spend more time inside their doors. On paper, it looks like really important work that couldn’t be done with a penny less than they currently have.
If it’s not that, it’s often jealousy. My mother is a high-ranking officer and catches a lot of shit from the low-ranking enlisted people who book her rooms in BOQs, file her documents, etc.–in a subtle way, so they can’t get strung up for insubordination. I imagine that there’s some resentment among the civilian rank-and-file toward people with more glamorous political positions, too. I imagine many of them feel put-upon or have a grudge against the government: maybe they got passed over for a promotion one time due to nepotism or office politics, they were pissed off and now they’re sulking all the way to retirement. It’s not unheard of–my family has some stories to tell about that, with several mayors, a US Attorney pushed out of office in the McCarthy era, a bunch of military men and a number of others in public service of some kind or another.