A few years ago, I had a job for which I traveled a bit doing recruiting. On one recruiting trip, I was sitting at dinner with my colleagues in a restaurant near my alma mater, where we were searching for new recruits, and a young woman came to our table.
“Excuse me, is your name Paul?” she asked shyly. I replied that yes, it was.
“Are you in ‘otis wants bread’?” she asked.
“I was, but we’re not around anymore,” I told her.
“Well, that’s too bad. I love your CD – I still play it in my car all the time!” she said.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I responded with a blush.
As she left, my stunned co-workers stared for a minute, and then began to interrogate me. They hadn’t known that I had been a musician, or at least a musician successful enough to have people recognize me in restaurants.*
They asked a few questions, I told a few road stories, and so on. Then, finally, the last question was:
“So, uh, why are you doing this?” By which he meant, why are you working for a credit card company crunching data when you could be a rock star living the high life, or at least the interesting life?
I was stumped. I’m sure I came up with an answer that had something to do with the relative incomes and working conditions of the two professions. We moved on to talk about different things, and the moment was gone.
But two things always stuck with me about that conversation. First, my co-workers clearly felt that they were doing what they were doing because they “had” to; since they didn’t have the miraculous gift of creativity, went the reasoning, they needed to find dull office-type jobs in finance and human resources where they could do well. And second, they could not believe that somebody like me, who apparently was blessed with the gift, would choose to work where they did for a living.
