Conforming to Type

Office life continues to ebb and flow around me even as I begin to disconnect from it.  My floor is going from being a marketing and ops floor to being an IT floor.

I always find myself wondering, when two groups bump up against each other like this, if people adopt a style of dress, fitness, etc. suitable to their departments, or if somehow different functions within a company attract not only different abilities but different looks.  It would make plenty of sense to me, for instance, given the relative cultures of the Marketing and IT departments that people in marketing would tend to spend more money on clothes, dress up more for work, etc.  But the differences seem to go deeper than that.

This seemed to stand out the most several years back when I sat in a building with large groups of both sales and customer service people.  Both jobs involved being on the phone with customers all day, but the types couldn't have been more different.  The sales people mostly looked like they spent all their time outside of the office partying or at the gym.  Most of the customer people looked like they spent more time on the couch. 

Perhaps it's that the propensities which draw people to one line of work or another tend also to guide their other activities.  Or maybe it's the other way around. 

Oh, and me?  Well, I look a little square to be in marketing, and don't spend as much money on my clothes and car as many marketing people do.  But then, I'm a marketing analyst.  I guess there's a little of IT in those of us who are more analytical.  And, in the most disinterested fashion, I will observe that the scenary is better in marketing and sales than in IT or finance.