Perceptions About Where You Work

I recently joined a new company and it’s been interesting watching people’s reactions when they learn where I now work.

Previously I’ve served in the Navy, worked for a children’s toy retailer, for an IT outsourcer and for a large company that made cell phones and software among other things. Now I work for Microsoft. (And to be clear this entire blog is my own personal effort and is not endorsed in any way or edited by Microsoft.)

I’ve always worked in some way, shape or form since I was a teen-ager and I’ve generally found talking about work to be a common conversation starter – no matter where I work it provides a universal touchstone that almost everyone can relate to.

When I was in the Navy people asked me nuts and bolts questions about what life was like serving on a submarine with the typical response being “I could never do that”, followed by the questions “so what’s it like being under water” or “how long were you at sea”. The conversation would then progress and I would try to gauge the questioner’s interest in the navy – did they just want a quick one-sentence answer or was there a genuine curiosity in their questions. As a qualified submariner, I’m proud of my service and can talk about submarine life at length, but I also recognize that for many people “The Hunt for Red October” or “Down Periscope” bookend most people’s perceptions about submarine life and they aren’t that interested in knowing anything more. 

At Zany Brainy, people would always comment on the name when I told them where I worked since most people hadn’t heard of it before nor had ever visited one of the stores. And although I was an IT manager people would invariably ask about Beanie Babies, Harry Potter books, Legos or any one of our other toys. Then the conversation would quickly move on to something else because let’s face it talking about an IT Manager’s job for most people is the verbal equivalent of watching paint dry – “so we deployed the patch but it caused a BSOD because of a .dll conflict so we had to edit the .ini file and change a registry setting……” Among the right audience that’s a riveting conversation thread guaranteed to have everyone’s full attention – outside of the technology world, not so much.

Working for an IT outsourcer that no one had ever heard of, usually just elicited blank stares before the conversation moved on.

You can Read the rest of the post at:

http://www.thommitchell.com/2010/04/25/perceptions-about-where-you-work/