[QUOTE=Leaffan]
Statistical analysis?
Following documented policies and procedures?
Corrective and preventive actions?
Control of non-conforming material?
Management reviews?
Process improvement initiatives?
No way I’m explaining any of that 100+ years ago.
[/QUOTE]
You explain all of these things, it would just take a while and would have to be done in quite simple terms.
[QUOTE=ASAKMOTSD]
I can’t even explain my job to my kids. Heck, I can’t even explain my job to most adults without a presentation deck.
[/QUOTE]
Chandler Bing, is that you? 
I’d have to explain television broadcasting. Advertising I think they would understand, but I don’t think motion pictures had taken off yet, had it? If it had, I could explain that they’re watching motion pictures (with sound!) in their very own living rooms, and every so often, they’ll see an advertisement for Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe or Maids and Butlers R Us.
I work for the Dept of Environmental Quality.
It wouldn’t be hard to explain what we do, convincing them why would be the tricky part.
I’m a clerk.
And being sick or celebrating a holiday is “a poor excuse to rob a man’s pocket.”
Yeah, times have changed oh so much. “Good Job, Brownie” and all that. 
I will say, “I sell technical support for computers. Google it.”
Every job I’ve ever had is easily explainable to someone from 1895.
After University, I’ve worked as a photographer, fabricator of shells for pick-up trucks, owned a courier service and taught high school. All of them understandable and semi-existant in 1895. The big stretch would be convincing them that for the last 20 years, I’ve held what was then primarily a woman’s job.
QA/QC in pharmaceuticals? The concept that a medicine must do what is claimed, and do it safely, and reliably, and that it is scientifically proven and documented to do so?
Hell, most people in the industry in the 20th century thought the concept just tree-killing busywork.
Technical writing? I can not imagine explaining that highly educated people are actually functionally illiterate with sentences that contain subordinate clauses. Yeah, I would have an easier time explaining QA/QC than writing that requires only simple sentences, minimal modifiers, only the imperative voice, and (this would completely floor them) strict consistency in terminology.
[QUOTE=Angua]
Coooool…
[/QUOTE]
Thanks! Once upon a time, I wanted to be an astronomer, but didn’t think I’d be able to get a job. So I went into the “money” major – physics. (That’s a joke for you non-scientists out there).
[QUOTE=Lightnin’]
I do special effects for video games. I don’t think there’s any way that I could explain that to someone from the 19th century without them tossing me into the nearest insane asylum.
[/QUOTE]
Nonsense. Step right up, sir, and behold the Wonder of the Age! This cunning little device is a distant ancestor of the penny-arcade amusements of your own era. It’s an electrical calculating engine that projects magic lantern images with such amazing rapidity that they blend together on the screen in an amazing illusion of Life and Movement. Here, sir, take this handgrip. By operating these buttons and levers you may direct the action of the images. It’s like a carnival shooting gallery … you aim, pull the trigger, and … well done, sir! You’ve slain the villain!
My friend here is an artist who painted some of the images you see projected on the screen. For my part, I acted as the dramaturge of the piece, deciding which targets should pop up when to make sure the amusement is neither too hard nor too easy.
I keep the computers going so I’d pretty much have to explain it the same as I do today.
I’m a wizard.
[QUOTE=twickster]
and why we do it the (marketing tool for mail-order gardening businesses) would be well-nigh incomprehensible.
[/QUOTE]
[adopting gently condescending tone on behalf of our nineteenth century forebears]
Ever hear of Sears & Roebuck?
[/agctobooXIXcf]
[QUOTE=Projammer]
I keep the computers going so I’d pretty much have to explain it the same as I do today.
I’m a wizard.
[/QUOTE]
Love it.
I’m a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) programmer.
We do make maps, but the serious work is spatial analysis
As little as ten years ago, I gave up trying to explain it, and just said. I make maps on a computer.
Today, more people understand.
[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Eh.
I work in a photo lab.
Photography was well-known in the mid-19th C, onwards.
Of course, I work in an Aerial Photographic Laboratory, do surveying from the sky, & it is scanned & mapped on computers…hmmm…
[/QUOTE]
Aerial photography was not unknown in the 19th century. The first aerial photograph was taken by the French photographer Gaspar Felix Tournachon, also known as Nadar, from a hot air balloon in 1858. It might be a bit harder to explain pictures taken from powered heavier-than-air machines flying several thousand feet above the earth, but I suppose an educated man from the 19th century could grasp the theory.