Completely and utterly uninteresting to people once they ascertained that I was not a lobbyist or something.

During the dot-com boom, I attended a party thrown to celebrate the opening of Alexa. I wore a namecard listing my current employer, an investment bank.

You never SAW conversations end so fast as when I explained that I was a technical writer, not an analyst. I was bearing The Dreaded Production-Class Cooties.

think I'd love to be a fly on the wall at a few DC gatherings, but I'm very glad I don't have to play there.

Same here, juliana. I'm not cut out for that kind of power play.

didn't know the impressions I'd picked up from my isolated little Alabama town were wronger than a wrong thing,

Like what, Susan? What were things you wished you knew earlier? (Just curious.)

I think this is a fairly common first question no matter where you are.

I found it refreshing that at my brother's wedding in Holland, I chatted with probably 50 people and no one asked what I did. At big parties here, it is usually the first thing to come up. It isn't always a mercenary question, sometimes it's basic small talk, but we define ourselves by our job more here than in most European countries, I think. In certain cities (NYC, LA, DC) it can be obviously and completely mercenary, but even in smaller places I've lived it comes up right away. I have, as an exercise, tried NOT to mention my or ask about their job to people, and it's HARD.

This is a foreseeable effect of the pervasive myth of social mobility. If "obviously" anybody who works hard enough can get ahead, then anybody who does not get ahead didn't work hard enough. It is a logical fallacy clean and pure enough to use in rhetoric classes. Alas that many people would not know the word "fallacy" if it jumped up and mugged them.

What's the fallacy? I only see a faulty premise. Or does a faulty premise also constitute a logical fallacy (I don't remember). Or is the first premise "All those who work hard might get ahead," or in other words, "Some who work hard get ahead"?

NYC = money, DC = power, LA = celebrity.

Or at certain times of the year, "prom."

Or at certain times of the year, "prom."

Bwhahah... good one (especially insofar as it applies to buffistas also).

There's a scene in the doc Born Rich where some obnoxious titled adolescent objects to Americans asking people what they do within moments of meeting. He acts as if it's an invasion of the deepeset privacy. Moreover, one apparently should be able to tell what a person "does" (i.e., does he or she have money) by their accents, their interests, their topics of conversation, etc.

When I've been unemployed for long stretches of time, one of the most depressing aspects of it was dreading going to parties or anywhere social because I had no answer to "What do you do?"

The logical fallacy is, um, I have forgot the latin name. But in science, you might call it correlation is not presumptive of causation.

Poor people who got ahead worked hard. Therefore, hard work is what gets one ahead. Double therefore, non-hard work is what causes a lack of getting ahead.

It is sort of like saying that because F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had editors, and they are both dead, that editors are fatal.

(Or my personal favorite, on basis of eyebrow-absence, that Whoopi Goldberg is the Mona Lisa.)

When I've been unemployed for long stretches of time, one of the most depressing aspects of it was dreading going to parties or anywhere social because I had no answer to "What do you do?"

Word word WORD.