• radicalautonomy@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Guess my job based on the following description:

    I sell a product to a people who don’t believe they have any use for it during what they consider their personal time.

    Answer:

    Tap for spoiler

    I am a middle school math teacher.

  • Sundial@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 months ago

    Yep.

    Network engineer here. I can’t count the number of times my mom says I’m in programming.

    After a few years, my wife figured out the best way to describe my job. Doctor of the internet. This was because I was working in operations at the time and would fix network outages regularly.

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Yeah but developed a quick explanation for it: Industrial water treatment tech for HVAC. You know how having a swimming pool or hot tub requires some chemistry? I do that for water in boilers and cooling towers used to heat or cool big buildings

  • ieatmeat@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Oh yes, I usually end up saying “I work in insurance” because any more specific than that and people look at me with question marks in their faces

    • Arsinoe@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Same here! It gets complicated very quickly, so I usually just say “I work in insurance” and leave it there unless they ask more questions. If they do, it doesn’t take long before their eyes start to glaze over and I change the topic to something more accessible.

      • ieatmeat@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        It’s nice to find a fellow “insurance worker” amidst all them software engineers/ IT guys here on Lemmy 😄

        • Arsinoe@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          There are dozens of us! (…maybe. I don’t actually have any data to back that up. You’re the only other one I’ve come across!)

  • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “I’m a stand-up comic.”

    “Ooh! Heckle me!”

    “I don’t know anything about you and don’t wanna say anything mean about you. Just enjoy the moment without getting a performer to do free work for you.”

    “You’re no fun.”

    “Don’t have to be on all the time, let me eat my burger.”

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      I imagine you get these questions all the time, but how did you get into stand-up, and how did you get the guts to get up on a stage and try to be funny?

      I love the idea of stand-up comedy, but I’ve been to a few open mic nights and it almost always seems like drunk people showing off, people that are hilariously unfunny, or people in the crowd that try to shit on anyone remotely trying to entertain.

      • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        I started out as a quizmaster, telling quiz for a night a week. I’d open my show with a new 45-second bit each week, built audience numbers over time.

        Then I realized I’d been doing this for years, and was an incredibly prolific comic! I had enough material I could just walk out onto a stage and just lengthen out my opening bits, cause I no longer had a quiz to tell that night!

  • Balooog@discuss.online
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    2 months ago

    Yes. I’m a near surface geophysicist. So I don’t look for oil or minerals but I do try to figure out what’s going on underground without digging. Mostly looking for mine or karst voids under new construction.

  • stringere@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    I cast spells that make the runes etched in sand translate the energy of magic stones into dancing light.

    Usually I just tell people that I work in IT and leave it at that.

  • protokaiser@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’m in DevOps, so anyone not in tech has no idea what I do/what that means. So, I end up just saying “I work in IT”.

    My new doctor didn’t like that answer when we were making small talk and wanted a more detailed answer, so I tell him. He looks at his nurse and says: did any of that make sense?

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Huh, I came to say pretty much the same thing. I’m DevOps, more or less, by I tell people I’m a programmer since that’s what I do

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Information Security is so hard to explain to old people who don’t know much about technology. My grandparents back then (late 2000s) never understood it no matter how I explained it, and they thought I was a security guard at the bank I worked at. You could also see the disappointment in their faces thinking how someone who took IT in college ended up as a security guard.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Describing my job? Yeah, sure. I do science.

    Explaining my job? Hell no. Nobody is willing to read a 20 page lit review to start to understand the background of what I do

  • gencha@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Explaining my job is trivial compared to the insanity I cook up in my spare time.

    Oh, so you like gaming? No, I’m actually not playing the game. I’m building a mod for it. Erm, okay, so this is for other players then? No, I’m mostly building it for myself. Ah, so you haven’t put a lot of time into it yet? Roughly 12 years. What? So what does the mod do then? It plays the game for me, and publishes in-game metrics to a monitoring application, so that I can see the progress of the game in an abstract form while I’m on the couch, thinking about how to optimize the automation further.

    Regular fun stuff.

  • sasquash@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    2 months ago

    Yes, if they are really interested and don’t have IT background. My mother once thought I look up codes in books and type it into the computer.