Personaliy types. (A useless guide to superficial discrimination)

During a discussion to a colleague about another colleague that was not in the office I had some sincere comments about said absent colleague. The kind of comments that are considered annoying and make people uncomfortable mainly because they are, you know, based on facts and reality. The colleague that was present mentioned he noticed I have the tendency to point out things like a, b, and c repeatedly about the colleague that was not present. (To be clear, we were not debating letters in the alphabet, they are just placeholders for things the colleague -absent at that moment- does and which I notice to be relevant and worth mentioning.) In my defense, I justified this by mentioning that the absent colleague kept on doing things a, b, and c on a regular basis. And that I was being polite by not going through the entire list of other things worth making comments about, in which case the Latin alphabet could not provide enough letters that would allow me to enumerate each qualifying as relevant to the conversation. I was only pointing to the more frequent ones which were enough to prove my point. The colleague that was present mentioned this type of reasoning was quite typical for my type of personality. After a slight pause of a confused "Huh?" accompanied by raised shoulders on mine and a semi-smile on his side, my semi-silent demand for details was met with an acronym of four or five letters. At this point the colleague that was present... you know what, from now on I will refer to the present colleague as X and to the missing colleague as Y. This should keep things shorter. So: at this point X had to take an urgent call and said he would send me a link, then left the office and the conversation was over. Hmm, this idea may have been more helpful earlier on than at the very end of the story involving X and Y. Alas, I will keep in mind for another time when I recount events involving a present person (X, see?) and a missing one (or Y, as you already know). Live and learn...

The link shortly arrived in my inbox and I put aside all the other things I was not doing at that moment, clicked, and landed a website with a personality test. Which I took promptly. And I did great. And then I repeated it some hours later during a meeting. And then again two more times during the following inactivity peaks. Each time with different results, but still great. It turns out I have at least four or five personalities. There were about sixteen of them in total, but it is only fair to assume the other ones are not so great. After all, there must be something available for the vast majority of the population, too.

About a week after this I discussed these tests with X (that is the colleague that was present, please keep up). He said the two* personality types I came up with are very similar, and that slight variations are to be expected based on mood, time of day, tiredness and so on. And that both were pretty much what he expected. Mainly because he had the same type. The only significant difference between us was that he is introvert and I am not. Based on this, my first conclusion was that he thought the same about Y (the colleague that... please stop, ok?), but he did not voice it. What I can only think of as his upcoming acknowledgement was interrupted by the appearance of Y, at which point the conversation was obviously hijacked to more exciting topics such as a, b, and c. My self-preservation mechanism automatically triggered: I put my noise-cancelling headphones on and pretended to focus on the screen and carried on with further conclusions, among which:
- Surgical precision is not the first thing I would think of to describe such tests. They tend to attach labels that are not always relevant, and in some cases quite way off. A bit like someone going through a stack of résumés when looking to hire someone. You cannot really put people in a box based on two sheets with things they (claim to) have done professionally or on how they have been answering to ambiguous questions for thirty-five minutes. (It only takes twenty, but I needed a fifteen minutes break to eat some apples and check another important email about a drone being attacked by a falcon.) Maybe you could, in some extreme situations. If one of their bullets on the list of computer skills is binge drinking and reckless gambling, you can decide right there and then if they will make to the short list for the interviewing round at your bank. Or if they mention a final solution for over-population based on eye color and skin pigment. But most of the times you cannot.
- If X was my girlfriend she would make sure to point out that my different personality types only mean I am unreliable, like that time when she said to wait her up until 11 because she had something important to tell me when she would return from going out with her friends. And I did not listen to her and went to bed at 1:30AM, before she returned.
- After all this intellectual effort I am getting peckish, and I should move my focus on what I would have for lunch. Also, I need to buy some apples on the way back from the restaurant.


*To be honest, I did not come up with four or five different personality types, but two. To be even more honest, I did not even get two. I only got one, because there is no way I would bother to take the test more than one time. Even once was draining enough. However, that would have led to a much shorter story and less thorough and useless guide. That would defeat the purpose of the explanation in the title