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Wednesday, November 15, 2000
From what I hear, a lot of employers these days are into personality testing. They do it mostly when they hire someone, along with the drug test -- "There you are, Howard, just fill up this specimen cup and tell us whether you'd rather spend Saturday night attending a noisy party or quietly selling secrets to our competitors."
My employer has made personality testing available to all of us and encouraged us to take the tests and attend the two all-day seminars that explain what the results mean.
Even though the tests took me about four hours to fill out, I will do just about anything to get away from my desk for a couple of days. Besides, it's fun to finally get a scientific explanation for why no one seems to understand or appreciate my true genius.
Also, it's reassuring to know that everyone who took the tests did indeed have a detectable personality. That's one of the reasons I love working at a newspaper.
One test we took is the one that assigns you four letters that sketch your personality profile. This interested me because I've been known to use four-letter terms to describe people's personalities myself.
You're evaluated on different scales, like Thinking vs. Feeling, Fishing vs. Bait-Cutting, Liking vs. Lumping, Tossing vs. Turning. Then all the percentages are boiled down into four letters, which will be put in your file and brand you as a malcontent for the rest of your career.
The first letter is either I or E, depending on whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. Most Americans, our counselor tells us, are extroverts -- about 75 percent. We speak up, demand our rights, join the party, introduce ourselves, paint the town, take one for the team and tell everyone a little about ourselves -- often before we've gotten our coats off.
Most journalists are also extroverts. The job almost demands we take some sort of perverse pleasure in getting up in people's faces, talking intimately with complete strangers and telling everyone what we know.
So you can imagine my shock to discover that I am, in fact, a certifiable introvert.
My colleagues greeted this news with whoops of incredulous derision. The extroverts all yapped at me about how I had to be one of them, and the introverts huffily challenged my authenticity.
"You're not a REAL introvert," they muttered in their brooding way.
I am so a real introvert. I am very contemplative. I may tell 70,000 total strangers that I get a lot of hair in my drains, but I am alone as I type the words. Compared to, say, Mike Wallace, I am Boo Radley in a dress.
But I'm also a Sensing-Adapting type, which apparently means I know how to have a good time. You've got your Sensing-Adapting types, your Intuiting-Suspecting types, your Griping-Moaning types, your Hemming-Hawing types, your Itching-Burning types, and so on.
Our counselor, a guy who makes his living telling people what their spouses have said about them for years, illustrated the Sensing-Adapting temperament to my seminar group by saying, "These people almost always have something fun in the trunks of their cars."
Like what? A body?
Oh sure, I suppose that's what a "real" introvert would have.
The more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued by the what's-in-your-trunk theory of personality analysis. Certainly, the contents of my trunk show the balance of different facets of my personality. I have Rollerblades, representing the spontaneous and fun part. But I also have jumper cables and a roll of paper towels, representing the cautious and practical part. The faint smell of mildew represents occasional wet-blanket tendencies.
Take a minute to think about what's in your trunk. What does it say about you? That you're a dabbler? A workaholic? A fence?
At first I wasn't sure my personality profile really fit me very well. For example, I'm supposed to be good with machinery, which would certainly surprise my VCR. But it's all right.
A lot of my colleagues said theirs fit them uncannily well, while others said they thought the whole thing was a lot of mumbo-jumbo -- which they would, being Doubting-Sneering types.
One woman confided to me that she was disappointed.
"It doesn't make me sound like much fun," she said. "I ought to be more spontaneous."
It's important to have a plan.
Samantha Bennett can be reached by e-mail at sbennett@post-gazette.com.