To think 'I'm not a nine to five person' is a slightly pretentious thing to say.

[Vintagejazz]

No one is a nine to five person. Yes, some people are more structured than others and can conform better to that regime, - while others will always be running in the door late, forgetting to fill in time sheets and overtime claims and work better with a deadline looming than to a paced schedule.

But there's just something a bit pretentious and 'ooh look how different I am' about someone airily stating 'oh I'm not a nine to five person. I couldn't possibly work at an office job'.
Yes you could if it was the only way to pay the bills. You mightn't be very good at it but you'd bloody do your best if your mortgage and groceries were depending on it.

Sorry, just heard a student, who looked in her early twenties, on the bus coming out with this remark in a very sneery dismissive manner and it riled me

Oh, and DaisyMaisie, the regulations and bureaucracy surrounding my job in aviation, and I suspect the jobs of those who work in medicine, polices, and many other shift pattern jobs, has to be seen to be believed! There are over a dozen manuals each at several hundred page for my aircraft type alone, before you even get onto the none-fleet specific stuff, which rolls in at thousands of pages. And it gets updated monthly, and we have to b familiar with it all!

I would have to say that rather than being pretensions, it is 9-5 office workers who seem to be defensive of their roles in life!

It's not an identity though, is it?

If you say 'I'm an [insert word] person' you're implying it's fundamental to your sense of self. I do think that's a tad pretentious when, as the OP says, you could have a bad break and find yourself working in a perfectly normal 9-5 office job. It might not suit you, but would it really change your sense of identity?

I don't go around announcing 'I'm a....person' or 'I'm not a ...person' anyway.
I don't like the phrase.

But are they implying that there is something wrong about 9-5 working or merely stating that it doesn't suit them? It doesn't suit me - great! This means that someone who prefers regularity isn't being forced to do a job with no set predictable pattern to it, whereas I rather like that.

Minnie but we are talking about 'I'm not a 9-5 person' not 'I could never see myself as a 9-5 person'
Of course, the other take on 'I could never see myself as a brunette' is that, having been a blonde my entire life, I couldn't imagine what I would look like with any other hair colour. I still can't see an insult, implied or otherwise, in that phrase.

LRD Unless said in a sneery manner, I take the phrase to mean "It does not suit me at all." rather than "All those in that kind of job are below me." I think it's just a phrase that's been used for a long time, rather than a perception of who you are.

hot it can be said in several ways, that's true.
But it is often said in a dismissive, 'oh all those office drones' kind of way.

I was never any good at 9-5 type working. I work best to tight deadlines and in short sharp bursts. I'm not particularly organised so all the paper work that went with keeping time records and totting up annual leave and working out how much time in lieu I was due rarely got done and was always in a muddle.
I witnessed people who were always in at 9 sharp, claimed any overtime immediately, knew exactly how much leave they had taken etc. But to be honest, I didn't witness their outputs being any greater than mine. We just worked differently.
So yes, by nature I'm not great at a nine to five regime.
But I had to accept, for many years, that I just had to do my best to conform to that ideal, because that was where the jobs were.
It's taught me to never speak dismissively of '9-5' people, which a lot of students in particular do. Most of us, for at least a part of our life, will have to be 9-5 people whether we like it or not.

Maybe so.

I'm on the fence, because I think sometimes people don't realize how it comes across. If you're talking to someone who loves their 9-5 job, they're unlikely to mind. If you're well-paid doing something you love, and your mate is working 9-5 and hating it, no wonder they feel a bit irritated at 'it wouldn't suit me,' because it probably doesn't suit them.

LRD I agree, it's not an identity thing, but when talking about jobs or careers it's perfectly acceptable to describe yourself like this. If I now had to take a new job and I was offered one in an office working 9-5 I would moan to my friends and family that 'aargh I'm not a 9-5 person' as I'm not used to those set hours, and hate rush hour commuting, hate sitting in the same office every day... This doesn't mean I look down on those who do.
Obviously I would probably still take the job to pay the bills!
It would be pretentious if, when introducing yourself at a party you said, Hi I'm so-and-so, I'm not a 9-5 person, but when talking about careers I can't see the issue.

I agree Daisy.

Do people who say it really think the ...I dunno 80% of the working population engaged in 9-5 work are all "9-5 people," or do they think they are just doing the 9-5 because that's the job?

I suggest the later.

Yeah, I can picture that party.

Some people do do that, though. It's part of the 'ooh, me, I'm so free-spirited innit'.

""you could have a bad break and find yourself working in a perfectly normal 9-5 office job""

I would really struggle, I've given up set hours for more money, for "anti-social" shifts. If I had to go for a new job, I would look at Retail or Care on NMW, and avoid a 9-5, because I couldn't do it without it taking a toil.

I also don't look at a clock, unless I absolutely have to.

My Mother will always ask me "how long did the journey take", what time did you get home and I have never been able to answer her.

I was accused of lying as a child and probably would be by the Police.

We can change ourselves, but in a sense, this is a part of who we are. My eldest is the same, she is constantly on call, doesn't know her working hours, likes that aspect.

My middle DD likes her weeks mapped out.

I meant less money for irregular hours.

Are 80% of people working 9-5? I doubt that given Care is a major employer, then retail, then the service industries and even factory work has rolling shifts.

Maybe you had to be there, but believe me this student was saying it in a very dismissive, looking down her nose way.
Fair enough, I realise it can just be said in a straight forward, factual way but I have heard it so many times being used in a superior type of way and it did annoy me when I was miserably toiling in to my office job every morning and trying to find other options.
If someone said 'ooh I could never work in a shop' or 'ooh I could never be a cleaning lady' I would feel just the same. If you had to do it you would do it, whether you liked it or not. It mightn't be your natural forte or something you're particularly good at, but saying you 'could never work in an office' does sound pretentious to my ears.

I think more often than not people do say it in a sneery manner, which may be why it's perceived in a sneery manner, iyswim?

John That's it though, they may not be 9-5 people either, but they do what they need to survive. A lot of people work 6/7 days a week, they aren't 1-day weekend people, but they do it to survive.

An office job doesn't suit me at all, and yet I do one, as that's my skill set, and I have bills that need paying.

vintage I think this is what this discussion is all about; people who are unhappy in their job, hearing someone dismiss that job, and feeling insulted because, actually, they don't want to be doing it either.
As someone else commented, if they loved doing that 9-5 job they wouldn't care if someone said 'I could never work 9-5' because they love their job.
I've got to go out now as there is loud drilling next door, and my dog is not a loud-drilling kind of dog. hope I don't upset dog owners whose dogs love drilling ;-)
Get back to work you 9-5ers!

I was a total bellend as a student 'ooh look at me, I'm getting a degree and the rest of you are peasants'.

My favourite one was me and my housemate banging on about people who claimed they couldn't find time to go to the gym. 'well I MAKE time to go to the gym and I'm doing a degree so I'm really busy'. I used to go to the gym for 2 hours a day, do an hour of yoga and was a hollistic vegetarian.

I had 20 hours of lectures a week for christs sake, I've done that now by tuesday lunchtime and my ex temple of a body is now a shrine to working late and eating crisps out of the vending machine for tea.

Let them have their dreams, if you knew what life was really like when you were young you woudn't bother.

I am calculatorsatdawn and I was a total twunt.

No one ever says 'I'm not a hoovering person' or 'I'm not a supermarket shopping person' or 'I'm not a collecting the kids from school person'.

They're just things we have to do in life if we don't have the luxury of being able to choose to have a cleaner/personal shopper/nanny.

Same with 9-5 jobs. Very few people leave school planning to work set hours (9-5, midnight - 8am) or whatever in an office or call centre or wherever. It's just the way life works out for the majority of people. There simply aren't enough free wheeling, creative type jobs to go around.

I think I might have been your housemate, calculators!

Sorry meant to add - so the people who say they couldn't do it because they're not that type of person, are being a bit silly. What they mean is they hope they don't have to do it. But do they really mean that if they were on the breadline and about to be evicted and a 9-5 job came along in the local building society they would go 'oh no. I'm just not a 9-5 person. I couldn't work in an office'.

JohnFarleys

it didn't help that he did medicine and I did law so as far as we were concerned we weren't just any students, we were the sort of students that if people saw us in the street they should salute us before taking off their coats and laying them over puddles for us to walk on.

YANBU but as a student I did the "I will never work in an office" thing.

I wanted to work in the glamourous world of advertising dharling!

I do work in the glamourous world of advertising, guess where from, go on guess

Young people and students are arseholes FACT.

Some people, really, really, truly, are not "9-5 people". Some of them would rather be living on the street than doing that type of job. I've known a few who were. Most, of course, just work harder to find a job that suits them.

I had a friend years ago who worked on a fishing boat in Alaska. That's not a "9-5" job, it's a "June-Sept" job. 20 hour shifts with 4 hours downtime, 7 days a week? No problem. 8 hour shifts with weekends off? No chance. He was not a 9-5 person, but would he be pretentious if he said you couldn't do his job?