What do you tell people you do for a living? 'If I am being a bit factious I tell them I am a paper stainer'

Drawn from a broader study into the experiences of newspaper printers within the context of ongoing technological innovation in their industry, this paper takes stock of the ways in which a group of 20 newspaper printers negotiate questions about what they “do for a living”. The findings revealed that whilst most participants would prefer not to talk about themselves at all, addressing this question was a common source of frustration. So much so that some had established specific techniques for avoiding such conversations or ‘short-hands’ that would enable them to extricate themselves from the interactions before awkward technical discussions were raised. Along with identifying the industries they worked in, references to children, their marital status and the recreational and sporting activities that they were involved in were key features of “the kinds of things you might talk about/the kinds of things that you would tell someone you had just met”.