It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one’s trade.
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
You don’t read classic mystery novels expecting to uncover little nuggets of professional insight. Then again, Tey’s The Daughter of Time is a unusual mystery, so maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised!
I love this quip, though—it jumped right off the page at me.
It captures the reason I value my membership in SMPS (Society for Marketing Professional Services) and my committee involvement with my local chapter. Within my firm, my sole fellow marketing colleague and I are an island in a sea of architects, designers, and various support staff. There’s upside to the arrangement, of course—influence on firm strategy, recognition as an expertise holder—but there’s a downside, too—a sense of isolation.
That sense of isolation is mainly owing to an absence of understanding. No one, aside from my one other marketing colleague, gets it. Aside from us, no one really knows their way around InDesign or understands the specific travails of chasing firm leaders for their thoughts on something that is often waaaaaaaaay low on their priority list.
So, SMPS and other professional networking opportunities with people who get it have an intoxicating quality to them. Now, I know that Tey claims mere “pleasantness,” not “intoxication” or outright “pleasure,” as I would have it…but I’m willing to stretch her commentary as far as I can go.
It’s the pleasure of getting to use jargon—SF330, Sam.gov, and the like—and getting to stand, metaphorically, shoulder-to-shoulder with someone else and realize—ha!—that you and this other person are looking at your shared professional world from the same perspective.
Taylor Coe 