What is the most boring job in the world?

Desert Island Discs must be the best personality interview format ever invented. It is interesting and informative even when the subject is less than either of these things. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the recently retired director-general M15, on yesterday (Sunday, 18 November 2007), was fascinating.

Among many other things the former spymistress-in-chief, a woman for whom secrecy was stock-in- trade discussed how she became used to dodging the dreaded "so what do you do question?" at cocktail parties and the like.  Her trick was to say she was in personnel. "People soon lost interest in me as soon as I told them that," she informed Kirsty Young, an interviewer whose fragrance no buffer of airwaves can dilute.

It is funny how a throwaway line such as this can prompt a wide array of immediate reactions. I guess we have all run into a bloke from personnel who knows just a little bit too much about what, precisely, his job is worth. But is personnel really as boring as it sounds? At cocktail parties, why are people more are interested in what you are than who you are? How do mothers, and other unsung and unpaid volunteer workers, describe themselves in terms that do justice to the value they give society?

My trick, not that I do anything as useful as be a mother, is to slide my tongue firmly into my cheek, look my inquisitor straight in the eye, and say: "Me? - Oh, I am a fighter pilot." Better guidance can be found at this useful, if intolerably pretentious, Etiquette International website.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, could and, no doubt would, bore anyone rigid on the subject of why and how HR is the most enthralling and invigorating job in the world. Yet it can be cogently argued that Dame Eliza, in common with any director-general, chief executive, chairman or other Top Dog, is no more than a glorified personnel officer. As the head of M15, Dame Eliza will have sat in judgment over issues as diverse as the containment of al-Qaeda and the personal Security of the Queen and the Prime Minister. As the head of Her Majesty's Secret Service, Dame Eliza will have pondered broad strategic ambitions and the most effective, law-abiding way to deliver on repsonsibilities. But do not all these things boil down to the simple matter of ensure people can and people do? What is personnel if it is not about being successful at these two things.

Check out the repeat of Dame Eliza's Desert Island Discs on Friday 23 November 2007 at 9am. Or click through to the web-precis on the BBC website.