She’s My Best Friend. I Have No Idea What She Does For Work.

Most Fridays, my fiancé and I pour glasses of Riesling and put on Mad Men. The exaggerated colleague-on-colleague drama is my escape. At my own nine-to-five, my coworkers are exceptionally pleasant and there’s no ego-driven management. (Sterling Cooper employees couldn’t relate.)

Recently, we were watching Elisabeth Moss’ character, Peggy Olson, get introduced to the different departments. When she stopped at the media department team, my fiancé turned to me: “Isn’t that what Shannon* does?”

I started to answer and realized I didn’t actually know.

Shannon and I have been friends since third grade. Sure, I know her favorite late-night snack (popcorn and M&Ms), her family drama, and exactly where her stories are going because I lived them with her. But I have absolutely no idea what her job title means or what’s on her daily to-do list.

For a moment, I felt like a bad friend, or at least a bad listener. But judging by other posts I’ve seen online, plenty of people are in the same boat. I’m not the only one in the dark about what all those endless messages my friend gets are actually about.

“Do I know what my friends do for work when they go to their job?” TikTok creator @carlabezanson asks in a video with more than 100K likes. Her answer was “not exactly,” though she did know their coworkers and all the office drama.

Same here. I know all of the key players and the watercooler gossip, but do my friends work in Excel? Make PowerPoints? Sit on Zoom all day? What, exactly, are they producing between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and why does it require two-factor authentication?

Over on Reddit, a thread on r/AskWomenOver30 is simply titled, “Do your friends know what you do at work?” The top comment reassuringly reads: “I barely know what I do at work.”

It’s comforting to know that I’m not alone. Still, it made me realize that after all these years, I should probably know what my best friend actually does all day.

For the record, Shannon does have an official title besides my best friend of 20 years: programmatic trafficker. She works in advertising. If you flashed her photo on a screen and asked me, “What does this woman do?” I wouldn’t miss a beat. “She makes ads!” I’d say proudly. But if you asked how she actually does that, I couldn’t tell you.

I have asked her and she’s tried to explain it. The TL;DR went like this: something about ads to be uploaded and to appear in all the right places, something about making sure the right people see them. And that’s when I realized I know this person so intimately, yet there’s an entire identity to her that I don’t understand — but I’m fine with that.

Friendship isn’t about knowing exactly what someone’s function is. It’s about knowing how their work affects them.

Here’s what I do know: She’s extremely successful, she works hard, and she recently got promoted. Her job involves logging on to Microsoft Teams and a lot of jargony acronyms like KPI, EOD, SOW, and WIP. She works with people who have titles like data operations analyst, senior director of revenue operations, and head of global operational excellence. I’m not quite sure what they do, but I do know that someone heated some type of seafood in the office the other day despite a sign that says not to do so in an HR-friendly way.

Outside of work, I know Shannon like the back of my hand. I know she likes having a plan — whether it’s for her finances or her Friday night. I know that if she orders a Diet Coke at the bar, she’s dehydrated and ready to go home. I know her ex-boyfriend just got engaged. I know exactly which movies make her cry and why (When Harry Met Sally…, the parts with the old couples, obviously). I still remember her Club Penguin username from elementary school. I know she won’t touch Pizza Rolls because she threw them up once after school years ago. I’ve read her lab results, and I know she’s low on vitamin D. And I know she’s at Target right now because, yes, I have her location.

I like to think this gap between what I know about her personally and professionally doesn’t mean I’m a bad friend, just that we keep our work separate from who we are. Our friendship started when the big question was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” not “What do you do for work?” Our shared memories and the intimate parts of our friendship are infinitely more interesting than a 30-minute stand-up that could have been an email. Or maybe it couldn’t have been? Again, I do not know.

The armchair anthropologist in me also has a theory. For generations, jobs were physically rooted in the same community: You worked at the bank or the hospital. Maybe a factory or the town’s newspaper. When the workplace and the work itself were tangible, it was easier for your friends to picture what you did all day. Now I have two friends with the title “project manager” who work in vastly different fields, and only one of them has unlimited PTO.

In a world of email jobs, we rarely take the time to learn each other’s job descriptions. We’re too busy brainstorming, touching base, and circling back. Hello, there are fires to be put out!

I know I’m a good friend, and I know I’m not alone in what I don’t know about my besties. So when my friends and I got together at a housewarming party recently, I decided to ask the question myself: Do any of you actually know what I do for work?

“Yeah. Like Carrie Bradshaw stuff,” one friend said. Someone brought up Andie Anderson from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Early-2000s rom-com job memes were discussed.

“Guys, that’s my freelance writing. I work in pharma,” I said, laughing.

It turned out none of us knew much about each other’s careers, beyond the titles.

“OK, but none of our jobs are real,” Superstar Nurse Shawna* told the group. And she’s not wrong. I may know she works on a cardiac floor, but besides that? I plead the Fifth.

Friendship, I’ve found, isn’t about knowing exactly what someone’s function is. It’s about knowing how their work affects them after hours: whether they’re rested, whether they like what they do, whether they need to vent. It’s helping them pick out the cute office outfit and celebrating properly when that well-deserved bonus comes through.

Do my friends work in Excel? Make PowerPoints? Sit on Zoom all day?

Our jobs might feel fake to one another, but the love we have for each other, and how badly I want them to succeed, is very real.

Still, we all agreed we should probably host one of those PowerPoint nights where everyone walks the group through their day-to-day, because it’s wild to picture someone as unserious as Shawna keeping people alive. No, my closet looks nothing like Carrie’s, as much as I wish it did. The beloved friend group, though? Miss Bradshaw and I have that in common for sure.

*Names have been changed.