Do you know what close family/friends do for a living?

In My Humble Opinion
41

To clarify, the job title might not even be too important to me. In the past, I referred to many/most office workers as “paper pushers” or “desk jockeys.” Nowadays, maybe it could be “keyboard crunchers.” I really don’t care if your business card says analyst, VP, etc.

Probably could distinguish between folk who deal more w/ either words vs numbers. Or folk who put in a lot of phone time. Or travel. Have to deal w/ the public in meatspace…

To me - telling me whether someone at BellLabs worked at those various areas would give me little info. But it WOULD mean something if you said they primarily worked in a lab with THINGS, as opposed to supervising people who did, compiling reports, preparing budgets, selling widgets, sweeping the floors, …

I think most people have considerable ability to present their work as clearly or as obscurely as they wish. For example, if someone says “I do hardware design for area 52.” That’s about as good as saying “fuck you” to someone unfamiliar w/ BellLabs. Maybe they want to maintain some air of mystery, or maybe they don’t care enough to try to make it understandable. But I suspect MOST employees could come up w/ a pretty concise single sentence that would be understandable to most listeners. Such as, “I’m on a team that designs big machines that are used in labs to test electronic components.”

And the listener has considerable leeway in asking followup questions (if interested). “What kind of electronic components?” “How many people are on your team?” “Do you supervise people?”

I have a hard time imagining NOT wanting to have at least that degree of awareness of how those closest to me spend 8 hrs a day. The truth is, I really am not THAT interested. So I don’t need much detail.

Also, most people I know are not so terribly glib and entertaining that there is a surfeit of conversation topics. We don’t really care about each other’s work, but we DO care about what is important to each other. And, presumably, they way someone spends 8 hrs a day and funds their existence is at least as important as the weather, or the local sports team.

42

Seems kind of weird not to know at least in broad strokes.

I mean, I know what all my cousins/cousins-in-law, aunts, uncles, brother, in-laws, etc… do. Maybe not in great detail, but at least as far as “is a banker at a bank in Waco”, or “Runs his construction company”, or “owns his own commercial A/C company” type stuff. I don’t know which bank off hand, but one text could remedy that if I needed to know. I actually know a lot about my uncle’s construction company, but that’s mostly because I more or less grew up around it.

Truth be told, they’re probably murkier about what I do, with it being lumped in as “computers”, or “IT stuff”, and knowing the name of where I work.

However the only three I know in any specific detail are my brother and my brother-in-law. BIL and I basically have the same job- slightly different levels, but substantially the same. Enough to talk shop and commiserate with each other, and on very rare occasions, have professional acquaintances in common. Brother and I actually talk, and he’s a teacher at our old high school, so I’m familiar with the actual workplace and cast of characters already.

43

You were talking about job titles. Managers had different titles, HR and PR people had different titles also. But the title of MTS spanned a very wide range of jobs and fields. That’s the facts.
I don’t think anyone used the area number outside - except maybe for Area 11, which was kind of famous. Likewise, at MIT departments and courses got numbers. Chemistry was Course V, Physics Course VIII, EE and CS Course VI. Freshman Chem was 5.01. But if you were at a mixer and a girl you were trying to pick up asked you your major, you didn’t say Course VI. Not if you wanted a shot, that is.
Internal names vary from what you use outside. But my business card when I started at Bell Labs said MTS, with no indication that I did computer science.

44

If I tell you I’m a mathematician, does that tell you what I do? My father had a friend who imagined me adding up great columns of numbers all day, every day.

Most of my friends are likewise mathematicians and so I have a very clear idea what they do. Especially if I look at their papers. I know, pretty much what my children and their spouses do. One child is a scientific copy editor, now working free-lance. One is a traffic engineer, now director of traffic and parking of a medium-sized city (over 100,000). The third worked as a developer at Microsoft for about 25 years and works at (on a free-lance basis) a company that performs due diligence on companies that are being considered as takeover targets. He basically studies their computer operations. He’s also written three books. One son-in-law works for Amazon (his company having been taken over) programming body shape analysis for helping online customers with size and fit. My DIL is a physician who works in a hospital in Mass. The other DIL is a stay-at-home mom about to become an empty nester.

I knew exactly what my father did, having been at his factory numerous times. My late brother was a free-lance systems analyst, although he worked at the same bank three days a week. One of the things he maintained for them was their link with the Federal Reserve. As a result of that, he never, ever used an ATM. My sister worked as a salesman for a now defunct jewelry chain. So yeah, I have a pretty clear idea of what most of my friends of relatives did.

45

I often think back to my childhood and I’m surprised by how close we were to our friends’ moms. From grade school all the way through high school, we’d walk in Johnny’s back door and yell "Hey, Mrs. Eeeee… Johnny home?" And the answer often was “Oh, hi, boys. Jonathan went to the market for me, but you can set a spell.” Cocoa and Cookies would ensue and we’d chat with his mom for “a spell”.

But we had no idea what the dads did.

Even if they helped coach softball or spent time with us on scout campouts, they just “went to an office somewhere”.

46

I have a lot of this. With my contemporaries, I generally know and understand what their jobs are.

But I know a lot of people who are a generation or so younger than me and I don’t understand what it is that many of them do for a living even when they’ve told me; it’s all “something to do with computers”.

47

My younger sister is a courier. My older sister has been a full time mother for the past 20 years, but now they’re all grown, spends more of her time helping her husband who is a property manager. My father was a Psychiatric Nurse, supervising a ward. My mother wanted to be an enrolled Nurse, but had to give that up when she became a mother, and instead had varied jobs in a hospital environment, some as simple as a cleaner, or telephone exchange operator, all the way up to a teacher.

My brother, on the other hand, I had no clue what he did. He was a highly respected something-or-other that required extensive travel, a lot of meetings, and a charismatic personality to get anywhere. I only learned at his funeral just how much he managed to do. He was, it turned out, an organiser and a convincer and a planner of social and community projects.