Career Alternatives

I had some down time at work this morning, and, instead of hanging out at the water cooler (we don’t have one), I signed up to attend one of the many classes the human resources department offers in our company’s learning center. The object of the course was to learn how to leverage the skills of different intellectual types in a project setting.

At the beginning we had to take a multiple choice question test in order to determine our type. The test told me I that I was a Visionary Philosopher, and then listed the types of jobs my brain would be good at…

Archaeologist, Detective, Psychologist, Sculptor, Architect, City Planner, and Chief Executive

Once I saw my career alternatives, I immediately stopped listening to the course instructor and instead began imagining my life as an archaeologist.

I’ve only actually met one archaeologist. She was a professor that I had when I studied in Rome. Her mother was full-blooded Native American, her father was Italian, and she (as their offspring) was an impossibly pretty combination of the two cultures. In fact, she was one of those people that seemed to exist separate from their surroundings in a sort of vacuum. As the program shuttled us around in a filthy tour bus for the field trips we frequently took , everyone’s appearance would slowly devolve into hobo-like dishevelment, while she somehow remained flawless. Her clean, white linen shirts retained their freshly-ironed appearance. Her shampoo commercial hair was full and bouncy. Nothing seemed to touch her.

And when she spoke about archaeology, you realized that behind all of that unrumpled perfection was an intelligent person. On one field trip to a town called Volterra, we visited the Etruscan tombs that she’d personally helped to excavate. As we walked into one of the grass domed structures, she pointed out that she and a colleague had been the first people inside that particular five thousand year-old tomb. She said that when they opened the door and stepped inside, for a split second they both saw the perfectly preserved body of an Etruscan Warrior lying there before it suddenly disintegrated into nothing when the corrosive outside air flooded in behind them. She said that at first she’d thought she’d imagined it until her colleague indicated that he’d seen the exact same thing.

Archaeologists are cool.

After the class was finished I spoke to the human resources person for a few minutes and, at one point, asked her if she had the answers to the test. (I’d missed three of the forty questions and wanted to know why.) She handed me the answer key, and I took a look at them. In one case I hadn’t been able to figure out that a pattern of numbers represented the squares of whole numbers. It was one of those questions where you had to figure out which number didn’t fit in the group.

“Who would know that?” I asked her accusingly.

She shrugged and laughed at me. She didn’t realize I was being serious. Afterward, she said that I must have a specifically curious mind, because a majority of the class attendees didn’t ask for the answers. That’s when I pointed out that one of my suggested careers had been that of a detective.

She started laughing again, but I ignored her and started thinking about how cool being a detective would be. I wouldn’t want to be the kind that works for the police, but would prefer to be the self-employed, private kind. I could run around in tweed suits and carry a magnifying glass and ask an incessant amount of questions. I loved Nancy Drew as a kid, so I would probably just mostly try to be an adult version of her. Hopefully people would describe me as wily.

Is it too late to change my mind?

What strikes me now as I finish typing this, is how I didn’t retain any of the supposedly relevant information on how to effectively work with the other intellectual types. This may imply that I have a tendency to veer off course, but I think I’ll opt not to dwell on that. After all, visionaries have more important things to consider. Like what they're going to have for dinner.

-EEK