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Deformation Professionelle

October 10, 2006
13:11 PM

When my sister D was an Au Pair in France in the sixties she worked for a family who lived by the Mediterranean on the Cote d’Azure.
When she arrived at the house Madame was there with her children but without her husband, he was away in the army in which he served as a professional soldier, evidently in a position of some command.
As the time came for him to return Madame took my sister aside and told her that she wasn’t to worry too much about her husband’s attitude towards the children; “You see he suffers from “Deformation Professionelle”
D was of course mystified but when the husband did arrive home and started to try and run the household as if it were a military barracks she began to understand the meaning of the phrase.

In Wikipedia they define it as:

Déformation professionelle is a French phrase, meaning a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession and forget a broader perspective.

In this case it refers to somene who tries to tries to order his life at home as if it was his workplace.

When D told us this story during the holidays this year it struck me as a singularly apt observation and I began to think of instances where the profession flowed over into the home.
I suppose the first finger should be pointed at oneself.

All the years when I ran the restaurant I was accustomed to leave a trail of dirty dishes in my wake as I cooked my way through the day. There would have always been someone there to clean up after me. To my wife’s chagrin I used to attempt to behave the same way when I cooked at home, I also had a tendency to make sauces and dishes in quantities far too large for the family. The rallying call to try and get me back to reality was “You are not in the restaurant now!”
Sile being a teacher of course practiced her own version of Deformation Professionelle.
When she would arrive in to the wrecked kitchen after I had produced my masterpiece she had a tendency to taste the dish, pronounce it delicious and then clap her hands and say;” Right! Now it’s tidy up time”

I tended to obey, no one my age likes to be given lines.

This of course makes one speculate how other careers behave at home.

Are the children of bankers given referral notices if they over spend their pocket money?
Do barristers constantly interrupt the family at table searching for points of order?

I once watched a man sitting at a table near me at a restaurant, who was waiting for his food to arrive, gravely crumble his bread roll into his glass of wine.
I discovered afterwards that he had been a priest.

The French, as usual have a word for it.

Comments

  1. E. Dwyer

    on October 11, 2006

    Is you Dwyer Restaurant still going strong? I am going to Ireland with a friend over Spring Break. We are going to Waterford, and I wanted to eat at your restaurant, because my last name is Dwyer. I thought it would be fun, but if your restaurant is no longer there, I will be sad! Please e-mail me! Thank you!
    Erin Dwyer

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