Please Don’t Ask Me To Explain My Job At Thanksgiving Dinner

Once again I am begging you to spare us both from the five excruciating minutes where I try to explain what I do for work and you absolutely have no idea what I’m saying.

Here, let me save you the trouble:

You’ll ask what I do and I’ll tell you something vague like “I’m in marketing.”

Then you’ll say “Oh, how exciting! Like that Don Draper, right?”

And I’ll say “Sorta…well, not really…” because I don’t know how to just shut up, smile, and nod my head.

Then I’ll tell you my full job title and the name of the company I work for.

You’ll want to know what I do in a day and why the company name ends with a “ly” or “fy” and I’ll feel obligated to tell you.

I can guarantee you right now that you don’t want to know.

But you want to be polite, and so do I, so you’ll ask questions like “What is B2B? What does GTM stand for?”

I’ll tell you it means “go-to-market” and you’ll ask what that means.

At this point, we’ll reach an impasse because truthfully I do not know and you do not care but since I spend 40+ hours doing this crap every week, I’ll want to prove I totally 100% have a clue about what I’m doing.

Now you’re nodding along and I’m explaining inbound versus outbound motions (“Why are they called motions?” “Oh it’s just a thing we say.”) with the false confidence of someone two glasses deep in red wine.

Your eyes will gloss over and I’ll say “You know what, it actually is just like Don Draper.”

And you’ll smile and pat my hand and say “That’s nice, dear” before forgetting we ever had this conversation.

How about we skip this little charade this year and pass the potatoes instead?