Apparently, when you have worked in the job market for a long period of time, you are suppose to develop a certain set of skills called, “soft skills”. One of those soft skills that folks like to tout most often is their aptitude to communicate, finesse if you will, with their fellow human beings. “I’m a people person,” they will happily cheer at a job interview, their smile on the verge of giving their face stretch marks.

It’s silly really. Of course you’re going to tell a perspective employer how wonderfully you get along with everybody. Saying, “Generally, I think most people, co-workers especially, are pretty much soul-sucking wastes of time and I would prefer to be left alone,” isn’t going to present itself in a positive light. So everyone lies instead, saying how much they just love communing with their fellow homocapians.

When you have to resort to a service job (something many of us are resigned to in this icky economy), that “people person” moniker becomes imperative. No one really wants to “serve” anyone. If they say they do, they’re either lying or were ignored as a child.

My fall-back job always tends to be “customer service”. I have no idea how this happened because I don’t consider myself a people person. Left to my own devices, I’m basically surly and a little bitter. Ask my husband (Don’t worry. He’s Scandinavian and expects as much). Yet somehow, I cared enough about the crap jobs that I was being paid for to be credited with “really caring about the wants and needs of the customer”, which actually wasn’t true.

To be honest, most of the time I was simply tolerating whatever person I was accommodating in order to get them to leave as soon as humanly possible. “How do you get people to leave you alone? Give them what they want.” That’s been my adage for service jobs, heck any job, period.

Writing is a job, and even with that, I have to mingle. I have to call people and convince them to have Author Events. Then I actually have to show up at these events and be witty and engaging and answer questions. I have to sell my books and serve my readers.

I suppose I could pretend to be a writer, like the ones portrayed in movies. They hide from the world in some remote location and just send their faceless editor their long-anticipated manuscript. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen in real life. No one truly works alone, unless they’re the Unibomber…or a blogger, and the pay usually sucks.

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