Workers Day: What do people think you do?

Today is the International Workers Day 2018. “What do people think you do?”

As a child, I watched my parents, proud baby boomers generation, leave home before sunrise to hustle their 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. civil service grind. Like it was typical of most Nigerian professionals and workplaces of the early ‘80s to late ’90s, it was not so difficult to tell from the dress code, language and airs around them what the other guy does for a living.

Then came the digital disruption of the early 2000s and explaining how you earn your bread becomes a nightmare for lots of millennials in the technology space.

“My parents think I am wasting my life pressing my smartphone all day. They have been telling me to go get a job!” says one Social Media Manager in the DMMN group.

“When I tell my uncles and aunts that I am a blogger, they just laugh and call me unserious”, says another.

Left to my neighbours, I am a loafer who carries a laptop computer all about. Some acquaintances think I am a ‘G-Boy’, a ‘cool’ term for cyber fraudsters. One Uber driver that I have used a couple of times thought I was an engineer. ‘Engineer’. Really? How nice!

Sometimes, I wonder how Kayode Abass introduce himself outside LinkedIn. For Caroline Wabara, where do you begin to explain the concepts of SEO and how it helps you pay your bills to your next door neighbour? Perhaps Emmanuel Ibekwe has enough time and patience to tell the usher in his church how digital marketing really sorts out the bills of those sumptuous looking meals he often ‘pepper’ us with.

It’s a lovely Tuesday morning in the new month of May and coincidentally the International Workers Day. Time to end this piece and go ‘loaf’ away.