Not A Blog™

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This is really annoying. It’s happened to me so many times that I came up with a number of coping mechanisms so as to not look like a completely inept individual. Technically speaking, it’s not that I can’t remember what I do, but that I can’t put it into words on short notice like this. (It doesn’t help that I do a bunch of different things at my job, so they can’t be summed up in a nice, single word, like “programmer”. It was easier in college. “What do you do?” “I’m a student.”) Sometimes I can’t remember basic facts, either, but that’s usually with information that isn’t visual, such as my name. I can recognize pictures of myself, thank you. I’m just not thinking about what my name is all the time, so it takes a few moments to pull up the data.

In order to not have this happen to me all the time, I’ve memorized a little speech about my job. How pathetic is this: I’ve stood in front of a mirror and memorized a speech about my job. Now here’s my current problem. Although I know that the answer people are looking for is a short one, the speech is like thirty second long. Much too long for casual conversation. See, when people ask this question, they’re just making small talk and they don’t really care—not really—about what my job actually is. They’re just making conversation for conversation’s sake. And to kill silences, I guess. I don’t know. Which is exactly the problem: I haven’t internalized this knowledge. So my answer, while technically correct in all the details, is much too long for the standard question-about-my-job-answer time frame. I’ve tried shortening my answer on the fly, but then I end up stumbling around again and I’m back with the same problem I’ve always had.

The other answer I could give—the short one—is too short. If I just tell people, “multimedia producer”, it not only doesn’t adequately fill this time frame, most people don’t really know what it means. So I have to explain it anyway, which just puts me back into the same situation I have with the answer being too long. I haven’t really been able to figure out how long this answer is supposed to be. If I had to guess, I’d say about eight seconds. Short of writing a new script to recite to people, I’m not sure how to address this problem.

What a freakin’ pain. How about this: don’t ask me what my job is because I don’t know you; we met through a mutual acquaintence; I’m never going to see you again; and you don’t really care. That saves everyone time.

-Pulsar