That's the pigeon hole where you'll find me, should you care to look. You get to know that, but the s.o.b.s at work do not. The bosstypes have bought the bill o' goods peddled by the homespun semi-retired consultroid whose personal relationship with the elected volunteer president has given him a nice little siphon hose on the association's bank account. Along with his coaching of the senior leadership turkeys, who are putative grown-ups and should be able to change their own dirty drawers, he's pushing personality typing of the entire farking staff according to the dusty, crusty old Myers-Briggs taxonomy.

All of us have taken the MB test and come down with some set of letters that stick us in one of 16 buckets. Most of us have given it the 20 seconds of our attention that it deserves and then moved on with our day. But apparently you can get management  groups to pay you to pimp the instrument to their underlings if they're bored enough with their aging niches or desperate enough for answers they're not bright enough to see for themselves. Officially, however, it's our option, and I have apparently decided to stiffen up my neck and refuse. A few others in the department had suggested they might buck the trend, but I seem to be the only one who's carried through with the threat. And other departments weren't really even given the option.

Now, we're assured that we'd score our own tests and it would be our option to reveal the results or not. Yeah, just as we were assured that it was our option to take the thing in the first place, and every reassurance had the fatal but attached along with the ardent plea to play nice and take the test and report your label to your happy, shiny teammates so everyone can know, somehow, the magic words to get each other to do what they want.

No, I won't be playing along, even if it's only me. I have to use all eight letters at one time or another during every damn day. So does everyone else. And yes, the rhetoric acknowledges that before completely ignoring it in a fairy story about how we can all match our tendencies with others' tendencies if we just know the secret code. That decades-old set of flash cards is no substitute for paying attention to people and responding as an authentic, individual human. I won't pretend that it does.

And if they say it's optional, dammit somebody ought to call them on it and make them walk their walk.