The crowd of more than one hundred that drifted into Slattery’s on E. 36th St. on a recent Thursday night looked like the usual parade of hopefuls at a networking event — professionals, mostly young, some not, nearly all strangers, with only a handwritten name tag to break the ice.
But unlike at your typical business-minded meetup, there was one highly unusual rule in place: Participants were forbidden from talking shop.
Welcome to the Notworking Experience. The first event of its kind was held in Washington, DC, on Feb. 1 and quickly took off.
Now it’s launched in New York City.
“I was driving one day about to go to a networking event, and I realized I did not want to talk about work,” the event’s founder, Geoff Woliner, told The Post. “Every event, not just business but even social, ends up being hyper focused on work so you don’t get to know the people, you get to know their jobs.”
“I was like, ‘Could we get to know each other more if we don’t talk about work?’” the 42-year-old added.
At the inaugural DC event, Woliner went so far as to have a buzzer that sounded if someone talked shop, but found it wasn’t necessary.
“People cut themselves off mid-sentence if they started to talk about work,” he said.
For the Slattery’s meetup, participants were encouraged to add a touch of flair to their name tags, by writing the name of the place they would live for the year if money was no object.
Answers included the usual European dream destinations, though one person wanted to go to Buenos Aires, while an older gentleman repped for Texas.
Devin Garg, 26, who lives in Murray Hill, was much more interested in gushing about his chosen destination of Italy than his career.
“There is so much history there,” he said. “And who doesn’t want to be in wine country?”
A software engineer at Amazon, Garg said he had attended meetups in the past where he felt like everyone was just there to get ahead professionally.
“People can be very transactional unfortunately,” he told The Post. “It’s just part of life.”
The idea of an event where work was off the table was particularly pleasing to him.
“The work self is one component of your whole life,” he said. “People have different things about them to talk about.”
Joanna Fung, 31, who lives in Brooklyn, was thrilled not to discuss her job in a hospital lab.
“I feel like work is a huge part of my life, and I love it, but New York City has a lot more to offer than the place you work, and I want to focus on that part,” she said. Fung wound up making a new friend, spending the evening talking about their mutual love of anime and video games.
Others chafed at the no-business rule.
London transplant Amy McGowan, 30, couldn’t help herself from steering the conversation toward work.
“New York is such a melting pot. People have all different backgrounds and different lives,” the marketing executive said. “It’s just so fun to hear about.”
A 34-year-old who lives in Williamsburg who didn’t want to give his name — “I don’t know if I want people to know I was at a meetup,” he said — felt like leaving work out of the conversation was a bit strange, considering how central his occupation is to his life.
“If someone asks me what I’ve been doing this week, the truth is that I’ve mostly been working,” he said. “I don’t mind talking about my job. I spend so much time doing it. It’s part of my identity.”
Woliner, however, believes that not allowing people to talk about their job levels the playing field.
“People are afraid of being judged by how much money they make or what position they have,” he said.
But the anonymous techie worried that New Yorkers might actually critique each other more ruthlessly on their personalities — not to mention their free-time pursuits.
“You can get judged so much more for what hobbies you have,” he said laughing.
And even Woliner, who manned the door at the event, patiently explaining the rules to each new arrival, couldn’t resist talking to The Post about his livelihood.
“I run a company called Winning Wit, and we do speech writing and coaching for events,” he said. “I’m also an author, and I have a book [a novel, Path to Perfectia] coming out in two weeks.”
“I’m really excited about it,” Woliner said. “I love what I do.”