This is mainly directed to those of us who work in jobs that wouldn’t have existed back in, say, 1895.
For example, I work in electronics, and while electricity and electric-powered devices were certainly known in the late 19th Century, they weren’t exactly the ubiquitous presence they are today. So how would I explain the essence of a electronics store in a nutshell to someone from 1895?
The closest I can get would be “I work at a store that sells gramophones, lightbulbs, telegraphic equipment, and wireless sets”, which isn’t actually that inaccurate when I think about it.
So, for those of us with Hi-Tech or “Modern” jobs, how would you describe it to an average someone from the late 19th century, in terms that they’d be able to grasp without too much imagination?
Uh, first I’d have to explain the concept of a female working outside the house, not in a factory and not in a housework position. Funny how the movement from artisan labor to factory changed women’s lives even more than men’s…
I’d explain it like I explain it to people nowadays: sometimes, the owners of a business want to reorganize it, but they’re not sure how. Since I’m good at organizing businesses, they call me and pay me to help them do it. (IT/organization consultant, I setup the Quality, Production and Maintenance modules of SAP)
Aw, you disqualified me. Which is sort of sad, as I think my job is particularly explainable to 19th century people, as it hasn’t changed much. I’m a classical historian, by the way.
See, I came in here to play the librarian card. But noooo, there’s dangermom in here before me.
For my previous job: well, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense that a woman was doing it, I’m sure, but:
I reviewed the accounts of businesses to make sure that things were as they should be. I also reviewed the processes in a business to see if they could be done better and to make sure they weren’t breaking any laws.
Ad writing may not have been as specialized a field 100+ years ago as it is today, but advertising certainly existed. So no problem at all, most likely.
1895? Then if it’s a really intelligent and knowledgeable person, they’ve heard of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace – all I have to do is explain that their invention got produced and took off in a really big way, and I now emulate Lady Lovelace’s dream of programming Mr. Babbage’s “Analytical Engines.”
I’m a postal worker. They’d get that part. They’d freak out if they saw my facility though. Acres of OCR machines and computerised tray delivery systems running around near the ceiling.
“The horseless wagons come in here, and deliver the mail. We sort the mail, but sometimes we use the electricity to drive a mail reading engine that can sort faster than a man! Then another horseless wagon takes the mail away.”
Like TheLoadedDog, what I do – edit a gardening magazine – wouldn’t require a huge amount of explanation – but how we do it would be a little more complicated, and why we do it the (marketing tool for mail-order gardening businesses) would be well-nigh incomprehensible. As would the fact that I live 35 miles from where I work.
As we see, it depends on the level of detail needed.
The OPs explanation can stop at “I’m a shopkeeper” and that’d be understandable to somebody from the 1600s, much less 1895. What his shop sells, now that’d get tougher.
I used to fly jets. Explained as a wagonmaster, that’d be understandable in Ancient Egypt. A flying wagon that travels as fast as the sun and can transport hundreds of people & tons of goods across throusands of miles? That’d be a little harder for them to swallow.
I’m a librarian, a position that existed then, if not in its current form until the end of the century. However, what I actually do all day to help patrons would be hard to describe. “I tell them the password for the magic box, where they find all their articles. Oh, and the magic box tells them where the books are, too. Also, I direct them to the bathroom.”
Well, half of my ‘job’ - medical student - is rather simple to explain. The material has probably changed entirely, but the framework is still fully explainable in terms of the Flexner Report of 1910. Less body-snatching, more test tubes. The other half, graduate student in biophysics and computational biology…yeah, that’s hard enough to explain to people now, much less those from the 19th century.
"So, there’s this scientific instrument that measures how heavy a molecule is. Well, not really, there’s some electricity involved, but if you do some mathematics, you can decide how heavy it is. Right, those molecules are proteins. You know what proteins are, right? Well, they’re these molecules that carry out the processes of life. Anyway, they have this really regular composition, and you can figure that out if you know their weight, and if you know what the composition is, and the order of its constituent blocks, you can figure out what it does in a living thing. You’d figure it out using a program, er, software? Instructions? Calculations? Hell with it.
I use the RAW POWER of unbounded electricity to drive a magnet 200,000 times more powerful than the very Earth! I shatter the substance of LIFE ITSELF within this fearsome device, and my CALCULATION ENGINES inscribe the glory of Creation upon whirling disks of metal and glass! I’ll show them! I’LL SHOW THEM ALL!"
My last job would’ve been harder to explain. Part of my job involved working as an information bookkeeper: I designed bookkeeping systems to track donations to an animal welfare organization. Another part of my job was to work as a switchboard operator for the organization: when people called us on the telephone, all calls came to me, and I decided where they should go from there. The third part of my job was electrical maintenance: I kept computers running. I’d probably just leave it at machinist or something.
Retired now, which considering my age might require an explanation to someone in the 19th century. My former job was essentially paper-shuffling for the government, so I guess I could get away with describing my job as clerk, or bookkeeper. Which would just make it harder to explain how I could afford to stop working in my mid-fifties.
Beat me to it. 'Course, explaining the devices I use to help me would take some time. (Computer, internet, SmartBoard*, DVD’s / TV) Then there’s the knowledge of my fields that didn’t exist back then. (I teach / taught Chemistry, Environmental Science, Earth / Space Science, Physics. They’ve changed a bit in the last century.)
*Had to throw in the SmartBoard reference to make other teachers jealous…
