Outside Interests

   Years ago, in an attempt to humanize us, an enterprising staffer in our HR department added an “Outside interests” data field to our personal contact pages on the company’s intranet.

     So now when you click on Carl in payables you learn not only his phone extension and office location, but also that he likes movies and Italian food. Before, you’d just call Carl and ask when he was going to cut your reimbursement check. Now, armed with this outside interest data, you can ask Carl for your reimbursement check and whether he’s had any good spaghetti lately. Before you know it, Carl’s not just a dilatory check cutting functionary, he’s become a real human being.

     I’m all for humanization, and I got the memo instructing us to update our intranet profiles, but I nevertheless had a hard time figuring out what outside interests to list.

     On one hand, I have too many interests. The whole world, and everything and everyone in it, is potentially an interest of mine. They only give us room for three interests. How do I choose?

     On the other hand, I have too few interests. While the whole world is open to me, at any time I am intensely focused on one interest to the exclusion of all others. So if you ask me today, my only outside interest is pre-war American rural music. If you asked me last week, my only interest was compiling an anti-thesaurus exploding the myth of synonyms. And the week before that? I can’t even remember anymore.

     This is a problem, both because it isn’t practical to change our outside interests on a weekly basis and because I don’t want to become too associated with interests I will soon ditch. For instance, a distant branch of my wife’s family knows me only as a golfer, an interest that was burning brightly about 15 years ago when I first met them. The interest extinguished shortly afterwards, but every time I see them it’s all about golf. Every Christmas and birthday, I get golf cards and gifts. I suppose I should tell them I no longer play golf, but then they may figure out I’ve been lying to them for years (you didn’t really love that testicle-shaped golf ball holder?) and I’d have to divulge my current interest to them and that would just set us off on a new spiral of awkward misguidedness, particularly if I have to explain the anti-thesaurus.

     All this assumes the point is to list my own personal outside interests which, of course, is completely not the point. This is work, not play. My real interests are irrelevant. The only interests to list are those best calibrated to advance my career prospects.

     So, to take an easy case, my interest in surreptitiously surveying the curve of a woman’s breasts is one of my few long-standing interests but, if listed, would not further my career prospects.

     Jocks seem to do well here, so I considered inventing a sporting interest. The problem is, it’s hard to fake it. Major spectator sports are out – day in and day out, their fans demonstrate a granular expertise I can’t come close to faking. I toyed with some obscure sports, but there you’re taking the chance that someone in the office will actually know something about rugby and demonstrate it on you in the hallway.

     Getting perhaps a little too meta, I considered but quickly rejected interests such as “God and mammon,” “truth, justice and the American way” and “making my boss look good.”

     In the end, I settled on a simple but effective “None.” That one word does double-duty, assuring the gunners that “I’m a workaholic” while winking “I’m too cool for school” to the ironically detached.

     Unfortunately, it also conveyed “malcontent” to a higher-up. He instructed me to get with the program, intimating that the program did not accept “None” as an outside interest.

     So I debated once again what interests to list. This time it was even more difficult, knowing, as I now did, that at least one higher-up with a finely calibrated smart-ass detector would be scrutinizing whatever I wrote. It paralyzed me.

     Realizing that cooking up more palatable interests would take some time, and that I couldn’t leave the “None” just sitting there, I called HR and asked the chirpy associate to delete the offending “None.”

     “You want us to just leave it blank?”

     “Yes.”

     “But isn’t that the same thing?”

     I tried explaining that it wasn’t the same thing, at least to one higher-up.

     “Well you have to have an interest. The system won’t accept a blank. So what are your interests?”

     Long pause while I conducted a furious internal rewind of the outside interests I’d tried and previously rejected. I thought I’d have more time!

     “Everyone wants to noodle over those interests. How hard can it be? Just tell me your interests and I’ll input them now. Do you like movies?”

     Desperate visions of “movies and Italian food” tattooed forever on my forehead scrambled my mind long enough to resurrect a previous reject and shoot it out my temporarily mad mouth:

     “God and mammon.”

     “God and Mammoth? So you like skiing! I’ll just write ‘religion and skiing’ and we’re good to go. See, that wasn’t so hard.”

     Click.

     It’s not so bad, actually. I don’t know how to ski, or, for that matter, anything about skiing you wouldn’t learn by watching the Winter Olympics, but I’ve successfully deflected a dreaded ski invitation by pointing at my knee and ruefully saying “ACL.” Too painful to discuss.

     And the religion part earned me some cred with the not insignificant God-fearing segment of the office population. Like everyone else, they used to think I was an anti-social asshole, now they see me as an anti-social asshole with a halo. Makes a huge difference to some.

     And now, at last, I’ve been humanized.

Comments

[tillerman]

I had a chuckle over this. I escaped from the corporate world a few years ago but your post brought back many memories about the way it was, and the various ways in which HR attempted to add a false veneer of humanity to an inhuman cubicle farm.

I've been pondering how I would answer that question about interests. I think I would have expressed my interests in some Zen-like phrases such as The Meaning Between Words, Living in the Moment, or Sailing a Proper Course. That would give Carl in Payables something to ponder.

[gabe]

True conversation:

Big boss: Well, enough about work, I think it's also important to be well rounded as an individual, what are you interested in?
Gabe: Er, well last week I went to an evening of contemporary music and ...
Big boss (looking out window): Y'know Gabe, it's good to take an interest in ... football, things like that. Right well, see you at your next staff appraisal then (ushers me out of the office)

[Thane Plambeck]

1) "Carl in Payables" -- good

2) "Antithesaurus" -- a dinosaur

[DarkoV]

Mr. O.L.,
I'm surprised that you were stumped. I thought you'd pull a fast one and simply state "Wodehouse"" as your interest/hobby. Perhaps even an non-capitalized "wodehouse" to throw people off the trail. It would have kept conversation to a minimum about your choice, except for the few folks that would actually take a liking to a conversation with you, and you with them.
A side note: I had no idea P.G. Wodehouse was buried in Long Island. I thought his bones would have been carted off to merry old England where he was more appreciated).

Personally, I always say "My Children" when outside interests are inquired about. "Children" alone as an interest/hobby will not do; you know what deep hole of criminality and suspicion that would lead to.
And when the kids leave? Well, "My Grandchildren", whether in actual existence or in speculative hope, also will do well. Either choice has stability, family (values, if you want to add that tone as well), and belief in evolution oozing from the words.

And it's always easy to get pictures, real or Flickred to post as proof on your desk or credenza. Even that Admin guy would have a hard time hassling you about the posted choice. What is he? Anti-family?

[R J Keefe]

"Who needs a hobby, like tennis or philately?
I have a hobby: re-reading 'Lady Chatterley'!"
— Tom Lehrer, "Smut"