Explaining What You Do
Have you ever been out in public and people ask “what do you do?”
Of course you have. It’s one of the standard questions when meeting someone new.
Being a public servant it is always funny to answer that question. When growing up, my father worked for the IRS. So when people asked what my father did, I told them he worked for the IRS. They always said something negative and ran.
After grad school, I worked for Department of Homeland Security. And I faced the same problem. When people found out what I did, they either yelled at me about how DHS was evil or made some Jack Bauer (24) comment.
Since I was an IT auditor and IT program manager for my time at DHS, I was really just one of over 200,000 employees working on a range of DHS missions.
But it is always interesting to see the public’s reaction. What have you seen? Any funny experiences?