As soon as he'd said it Ford had wondered if he should have said something else. Not that there was anything else to say, because he couldn't very well lie about the place that he worked, but maybe he could have tried to put on a tone that implied he didn't much like it, like he'd done when he was talking about his siblings, if that would have gone over better with Macnair. Would Education or Transportation have been better? Had Macnair said those things because he thought they were good departments to work in, or was it the opposite? Maybe he'd been sizing Ford up and already making fun of him by assuming he worked in some boring division. Maybe Macnair had already made his judgements and decided Ford was beneath his notice, and that had been a subtle way of letting him know.

But then he smiled. It was a slow smile and in another context he might have recognized it as a worrisome one, but after fretting over whether or not he'd made some irreparable blunder by announcing his choice of career Ford was too relieved by it to notice. The follow on questions had him all nerves again, though. Which was the right answer? He knew from experience at Hogwarts that it was not cool to like ghosts, but — well, he didn't particularly think he was the adventurous sort. He'd chosen Spirit Division in part because it was the least likely to put him in harm's way, in the course of typical duties, and he'd never been the strongest with practical magic. He wasn't going to run off an be a cursebreaker, that was for sure. But — would Macnair prefer if he were adventurous?

He took a drink, both to buy himself a second to think of what to say and to steel himself. He was going to lie, he was fairly certain, and he wanted to do it with enough confidence that he could fool the other man. If that was even possible — the way that Macnair had looked at him just a moment ago, when he'd leaned back in his chair, made Ford feel as though he could see too much of him, and he wasn't sure he was actually capable of pulling off a lie when he felt this exposed. Maybe not a lie, then — maybe a nonanswer instead, but one that implied a lie.

"Adventurous is just a matter of context, isn't it?" he asked, and he had no idea what he was even saying or if this even made sense but he was trying to infuse as much fake confidence into it as he could. "It's not a label anyone can put on themselves. So if you're curious —" his heart stopped before he said this next bit, honestly it did, but he said it anyway because he was trying to ride this fake confidence through and hope that it got him to the other side of this interaction and made Macnair like him "— you'll just have to stick around and find out."