Curiously, I can't recall ever being asked this very often. Perhaps this has been, because by the look of me, the answer to the real question, at least in a potential dating context, would obviously be, 'I don't make a whole lot of money but this isn't what matters to me.'
On the other hand, we swim in different waters, you and I. When this sort of inquiry had ever been posed to me by someone of the opposite sex in social settings, during those rare times when I was actually both single and might regard myself as 'available', what I think I'm hearing is 'so, what would you be worth to my lifestyle preferences if we became lovers?'
Or perhaps more cynically, 'do you really think you can afford me?'
I can agree, if I take your meaning, that the question can often be both an inauthentic expression of feigned interest in one's actual work life, as well as a veiled opening to an intrusive financial interrogation. Maybe even in purely non-sexual contexts the question is still an assessment of whether or not one is eligible to meet the terms of a given clique, which I rarely have been in my own life.
In clique-eligibility terms, at one point I knew quite a number of people one routinely described as 'friends' (during that era when a TV sitcom by that name depicting no such thing was all the rage), and the question of current occupation was a moot one because most of the group all worked for the same upscale grocery store, the very prototype of today's Whole Foods shopping experience. The rules of that circle were that everyone who worked on the floor was one caste, everyone in the offices (who nearly outnumbered those doing the actual work for some weird prestige-related reason) made up an entirely different, higher, caste, and the two were all but mutually exclusive in social terms.
One time during a shift one of my coworkers asked me what I did for fun. This was the more crucial distinguishing feature of a person within that caste, as we all knew that we did all the work while the bosses took home all the money, so what was left for any of us to take an interest in each other was that all-important trait among any college-town proletariat, of how much fun anyone had and how they went about having it. (Rock-climbing, for instance, was an admirably correct response. Have you ever overheard a more boring or viciously competitive conversation, than among rock-climbers?)
My answer was something to the effect that I do love to curl up with a good book of an evening.
Now, I would have thought, naively, that in a setting where everyone had a major and was committed to achieving a degree in their interest-area of choice, that the conversation would then proceed affably into the arena of what makes a book interesting and why, which books we might be able to recommend to each other and why, etc.
Instead I got a rather sarcastic, 'wow, I wanna party with you Ron!', whereupon my interlocutor began to avoid further exchanges with me during subsequent shifts together. I did find out he was a film-studies major (there was a lot of that going around) and that nothing seemed to stimulate his interest more than to talk about microbrew, college ball or as-yet-unsampled pussy. I gathered that to discuss Dostoevsky with him instead might have fallen flat, like your average twelve-dollar glass of appallingly bitter fermented hops tends to do after five minutes.
If someone were to ask me what I do and I answered them during my working career, "I build houses', I knew I could take it as a given that there is nothing at all interesting about building houses, except to other men who also build houses, who tend not to prefer talking shop after hours. Personally, I found this work fascinating, challenging, more technically intricate than is popularly believed, directly vital to the human condition, and cruelly under-rated as a contribution to it.
'Oh so you work construction then.'
Whatever that means. Can we talk about good books instead?
Curiously, I can't recall ever being asked this very often. Perhaps this has been, because by the look of me, the answer to the real question, at least in a potential dating context, would obviously be, 'I don't make a whole lot of money but this isn't what matters to me.'
On the other hand, we swim in different waters, you and I. When this sort of inquiry had ever been posed to me by someone of the opposite sex in social settings, during those rare times when I was actually both single and might regard myself as 'available', what I think I'm hearing is 'so, what would you be worth to my lifestyle preferences if we became lovers?'
Or perhaps more cynically, 'do you really think you can afford me?'
I can agree, if I take your meaning, that the question can often be both an inauthentic expression of feigned interest in one's actual work life, as well as a veiled opening to an intrusive financial interrogation. Maybe even in purely non-sexual contexts the question is still an assessment of whether or not one is eligible to meet the terms of a given clique, which I rarely have been in my own life.
In clique-eligibility terms, at one point I knew quite a number of people one routinely described as 'friends' (during that era when a TV sitcom by that name depicting no such thing was all the rage), and the question of current occupation was a moot one because most of the group all worked for the same upscale grocery store, the very prototype of today's Whole Foods shopping experience. The rules of that circle were that everyone who worked on the floor was one caste, everyone in the offices (who nearly outnumbered those doing the actual work for some weird prestige-related reason) made up an entirely different, higher, caste, and the two were all but mutually exclusive in social terms.
One time during a shift one of my coworkers asked me what I did for fun. This was the more crucial distinguishing feature of a person within that caste, as we all knew that we did all the work while the bosses took home all the money, so what was left for any of us to take an interest in each other was that all-important trait among any college-town proletariat, of how much fun anyone had and how they went about having it. (Rock-climbing, for instance, was an admirably correct response. Have you ever overheard a more boring or viciously competitive conversation, than among rock-climbers?)
My answer was something to the effect that I do love to curl up with a good book of an evening.
Now, I would have thought, naively, that in a setting where everyone had a major and was committed to achieving a degree in their interest-area of choice, that the conversation would then proceed affably into the arena of what makes a book interesting and why, which books we might be able to recommend to each other and why, etc.
Instead I got a rather sarcastic, 'wow, I wanna party with you Ron!', whereupon my interlocutor began to avoid further exchanges with me during subsequent shifts together. I did find out he was a film-studies major (there was a lot of that going around) and that nothing seemed to stimulate his interest more than to talk about microbrew, college ball or as-yet-unsampled pussy. I gathered that to discuss Dostoevsky with him instead might have fallen flat, like your average twelve-dollar glass of appallingly bitter fermented hops tends to do after five minutes.
If someone were to ask me what I do and I answered them during my working career, "I build houses', I knew I could take it as a given that there is nothing at all interesting about building houses, except to other men who also build houses, who tend not to prefer talking shop after hours. Personally, I found this work fascinating, challenging, more technically intricate than is popularly believed, directly vital to the human condition, and cruelly under-rated as a contribution to it.
'Oh so you work construction then.'
Whatever that means. Can we talk about good books instead?