In the workplace, unexpected questions can lead to moments of awkward hilarity. Peter Venkman’s advice to Ray Stanz in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters was simple: ‘When someone asks if you’re a god, you say ‘yes.’” My advice? If HR asks if you know what furries are, act dumb.
For starters, let’s get the terminology out of the way. If you aren’t familiar with furries, they’re people with proclivities for dressing up in furry animal costumes, sometimes for the sake of rubbing on each other. Imagine going to a drunken frat party of sports teams mascots like the Philadelphia Flyers Gritty and Blue from the Indianapolis Colts.
If you need a more in-depth picture, go find a copy of the movie Pottersville to stream. I can’t say enough about how funny Pottersville is considering it is a romantic comedy that involves Bigfoot and furries. If I told you that Ron Perlman played one of the furries, you wouldn’t believe me, but it makes it even funnier.
Now you might ask yourself a number of questions after I make that statement. How did this happen? Were you in harassment training already? Where were you working that this even came up?
The answers to these questions start a bit over ten years ago. I took on an engineering job at SugarCRM. A friend of mine was already working there and had said it would be a great move for me. I didn’t really care much for their tech stack. Coding in PHP makes me feel dirty. I wanted to try out something new in my career and felt this might be an interesting break from ColdFusion and Java.
Now, this is going to sound horrible to the younger engineers reading this, but pre-pandemic hiring on for a remote job was very much an in-person process. For interviewing, they flew me out for the final rounds of interviews and we did the offer process through emails and calls. When it came time to start, then I had to fly back out for a few days from Indianapolis to San Jose for picking up my equipment, doing some training and getting through all the Human Resources onboarding processes.
I know, I know, this is all done via Zoom or Teams now and nobody has to admit they aren’t wearing pants as long as they remain seated. In 2012, we weren’t so advanced yet. At the time, the company was going through a lot of growth. Just like any Silicon Valley company of the same age and growth, they were recruiting a lot. I may have been the only engineer going through onboarding that week, but the HR overview sessions had about 35 or 40 new hires in this conference room. The other new hires were executive assistants, marketing professionals, accountants and sales people.
They started us off with all the normal stuff. The paperwork and busy work parts of starting a new job in the US, fill out the W-2, decide how much you are willing to lose for the health insurance coverage for a small family, etc.
Then there was the overall “Welcome” to the company talk from the HR person. She started off asking for folks to raise their hands if we knew what SugarCRM made, a lot of us did. Then a few questions like “Who are some of our largest customers”, “What technologies do we use” etc. I think she was getting us all into a false sense of security with raising hands and volunteering for the safe questions.
Eventually, she asked in an upbeat cheerful tone, “Who knows what furries are?”
I didn’t realize it until a half a beat after my arm went up, but my trusting Midwestern self had the only hand raised. She pounced on me like a tiger (on a related note: tons of furries idolize Tony the Tiger, it really can ruin a good bowl of cereal). She stepped close to me and asked, in that innocent tone that only a practice HR negotiator can pull off, for me to explain to the room what are furries.
I’ve had embarrassing moments in my professional and semi-professional career. Technically, at this point 8 years out of college, this wasn’t even the worst. I’ll have to write another blog post on that one, because that one was awkward. I went wide-eyed for a few seconds, darting accusing glances at others around. I swear some guy in khakis and an Oxford button-down winked at me. That guy knew, but he knew not to admit it.
So, I explained furries. I stammered a bit, but I figured if the HR person was standing there I couldn’t get fired on day one for asking their question. Then we learned as a class that the reason we had to be aware was that the annual convention the company hosted for their customers was in the same conference center and at the same time as the San Francisco Bay Area furry convention.
I suppose if your company convention is sharing conference hall space with furries, it would be in everyone’s interest to get that shock out during onboarding. At any rate, that’s why if HR asks you what furries are, just play dumb. It’s likely better than explaining fully-clothed, semi-erotic fetishes to your coworkers. Unless you’re into that kind of thing.