I just remembered another of these situations. In that one, I was hired by an ESTP (my own armchair assessment of him), and he was awesome to work with. Got things done, was hardworking and knew what to tell others to do to get things to come together well. Knew how to be charming, too.
Then it turned out that the guy who was actually in charge of the project was not this guy--he was another rabbit-like character. (For some reason, the characters who do this almost always have a rabbit-like quality, a bizarre combination of delicateness and self-assertiveness, like the counterintuitively assertive way male rabbits fuck. As if they think they're stallions but they're really, well, rabbits. It's strange. I don't know if anyone else relates to getting this impression about similar characters.) This dude who was actually in charge turned out to have ceded pretty much the running of the whole thing over to the much more competent ESTP. Which was a good move, it turned out, not only because the ESTP knew how to move things along, but also because the rabbit guy was really temperamental and prone to self-sabotaging blow-ups. One day, the ESTP decided he had had enough of this, and he walked away from the project (it was an on-going one). Within like a day, the rabbit guy fired me. It turned out that the ESTP had liked me because I did my job, and the rabbit guy hadn't for whatever reason, but apparently couldn't stand up to the ESTP and just fire me whenever. He waited until the ESTP was out of the way.
It was a bizarre situation. All of these are, really.
I don't think it's exclusively an MBTI type thing, and I've definitely met ENFPs and INFPs, and even people who've reminded me of rabbits, with whom I've gotten along fine. (I've also met self-described ENFPs who didn't remind me of rabbits at all--still not sure why some people do!) I think it has something to do with... I'm not sure what. Like the combination of a political viewpoint, a geographical custom/habit, a particular existential issue and confusion about how to deal with that, some kind of low self-esteem or neuroticism and assertiveness in spite of that... I wonder if in Big Five terms, they're just high in extraversion and also high in neuroticism. That would at least explain the "rabbit" impression I get from them.
Yeah, I should definitely screen for over-friendliness. Although the ESTP also wanted to hug me when we met. But he didn't open his arms and make a move toward me; he just exclaimed, in his "charming" voice, "We're huggers here! Can I give you a hug?" and I said, "No, thank you," or "We don't know each other," or whatever I said, and he sort of shrugged it off and got on with business. He didn't have that rabbity, "vulnerable" approach.
Well, whoever these people are, I hope I'm getting better at identifying a potential problem, so that I can be aware of it in the future before it goes haywire. I think it's a common trait or set of traits in the particular profession I'm working in and encountering it so much in. It's not an age thing, but it may be a maturity thing, and/or an ideology thing.
I hate to say that maybe I'm in the wrong profession, because that's like saying "I couldn't hack it because of the Lilliputians." Like, I couldn't hack it, not because the competition was so fearsome, but because I was eaten alive by bunnies.
:whacko:
The best thing would probably be to make money by doing business with people in a profession that attracts and retains more reasonable folks, and to run my own show when it comes to the arts, rather than working for these unreliable people.
