I was briefly a bartender, because I needed extra money and for some reason this place hired me. Damn that job sucked. You have my sympathy.
Here’s mine: I work for a hospital. No, I do not have great health insurance. My health insurance is just as crappy as yours.
Let’s see, what do I get asked on a regular basis:
Can you:
fix my parking ticket?
Handle my divorce?
Write my will?
Help my friend with a bankruptcy/DUI/kid with juvi problems/other bad thing?
Close my house?
Get my relative in the country?
Sue huge corporation for whatever personal offense I feel I have suffered?
These are just the main category headings. These are also things I hear around the office, and these dudes know what I do. Explaining people what IP/IT corporate transactional law is a huge waste of my time. I just say “corporate law” and that usually stops the questioning, except for the suing part.
I work at a preschool/daycare center.
I am not a babysitter. True, I’m not a full-fledged teacher either, but the “real” teachers, my boss, and the parents expect me to contribute to the children’s academic development in a way well beyond what you expect of the teenager you hire to watch your kids while you go to the movies. I lead Circle Times, show them how to use Montessori materials, and help maintain an environment to encourage the children’s creativity and curiosity.
I don’t spend the whole day playing with the children. I play with them sometimes, but mostly I believe kids should be allowed to play without adult interference, other than to make sure nobody is getting hurt or left out. On the other hand I do read to them, sing with them, answer their questions, and suggest solutions to conflicts.
I don’t spend all day changing diapers and wiping noses, and trust me, changing diapers and wiping noses aren’t even close to the worst parts of my job.
I get hugs and drawings, encourage reluctant eaters to just finish that half of their sandwich, watch children in the process of figuring out the mysteries of their world, break up fights, put up little girls’ hair, and sweep the floor. In other words, I have the best and the worst job in the world 
(And it’s temporary; I’m studying to get my teaching certificate - to teach English to elementary and junior high pupils.)
I’m an archaeologist working for a private consulting firm.
I do not look for dinosaurs. I would be hard-pressed to define a dinosaur. I haven’t the faintest idea how long ago the Miocene epoch was. Your average 8-year old knows more about dinosaurs than I do.
I’m not looking for gold. Aside from a gold filling I once pulled out of a privy, I have never found gold. Coming in late at night and digging around in our excavation units will not reveal a previously unknown Mother Lode. It will, however, totally fuck-up any stratigraphic context we are trying to preserve.
I do not know how much your arrowheads, hand stones, beads, bottles, or other artifacts are worth. We do not buy them nor do we sell them.
The government and/or the Indians are not going to come in and seize your land because you found an arrowhead or an old bottle.
I have never been to Giza.
I think Indiana Jones is great.
Privies are exactly what you think they are. Yes, we are digging up old shit.
Yes, we document everything over 50 years old. I know it sounds silly but its the rule.
I know what a leverite is.
Our preferred course of action is always avoidance. If we dig up a site, it is just as destroyed as if a bulldozer went through it. The difference is that we are a lot slower, more careful, and take really, really, good notes.
Why?
That’s your main purpose, or just what happens most often?
Every older than 50 years? Couldn’t you just ask that little old lady down the street who know every that happened in the neighborhood in the last 75 years?
And what is a leverite?
At the risk of hijacking… there are private archaeologists? I always assuemd they were all academics. Maybe that’s another misconception about your job. Do you clear sites before construction begins, or something?
(You ever do an “Ask the…” thread?)
My first thought was that it was one of the Hellraiser characters, but they are cenobites. 
I’m a professor. Like the OP, I encounter misconceptions about my schedule.
No, I can’t come to a meeting at 8:00 AM–my job didn’t stop at 5:00 the night before, but included hours of grading and planning afterward.
No, I’m not available just because I’m not teaching at the time indicated. Some of my time actually belongs to me.
No, I’m not making buckets of money for doing nothing. I’m making a cup of money for working 50-60 hours a week.
Due to the field I teach in:
No, I’m not analyzing you.
No, I won’t tell you what I think your [sister, neighbor, child]'s diagnosis is.
No, I’m not interested in arguing with you about ADHD medication for children.
No, I’m not a psychiatrist.
When I used to teach English:
No, I don’t really care about your grammar.
No, I don’t really care about my grammar.
ETA: I don’t know what a leverite is (unless it’s related to Jewish marriage laws), but I know a thing or two about Nabatean stoneworks for no particular reason. Because yes, I read books for fun even though I’m not an English teacher.
That’s too bad. I’ve never met a mechanic that couldn’t ballpark it within a $100 price range. Live up to your stereotype man!
As for me, I’m a librarian. Like Sampiro, I’m a male librarian. While he covered most of the good stuff, there are a few more that are nice and particular to public libraries:
Everyone in the building is not a librarian except me. See, I’m a man, so I’m only there to help out the nice female librarians. A very few assume I’m not even being paid.
I am not REQUIRED to buy something for the collection just because you requested it. I will especially not be buying Loose Change, so stop asking.
I do not know how to “work” every website on the Internet. I probably could figure it out, but helping you exclusively for 30 minutes while ignoring everyone else is not going to happen.
I have not read every book in the library. I also don’t know which one had the blue cover with the cannibal that was on the shelf somewhere two weeks ago.
I could probably go on, but I shouldn’t be giving this much thought to work on my day off.
Just wanted to drop in and say that I am enjoying all the info given here. It’s quite educational.
When we excavate privies it is generally in an urban area with a fair amount of foot traffic. I probably have the following conversation five or six times a day:
What are you digging up?
A privy.
A privy? Isn’t that like an outhouse?
Yep.
Does that mean you’re digging in…?
Yep.
Oh.
And a leverite is a “Leave 'er right there.”
We work under the “environmental compliance” umbrella for projects which have some kind of state of federal entailment. We do lots of work for agencies, corporations, utilities, etc. Generally our work is overseen by a government-type but we do all of the heavy lifting (i.e. we’re hired to do all of the documentation, excavation, reporting, etc. which we then turn over for review).
I’m a network engineer for a movie studio.
If I show up in your office, it’s to take care of a network problem. Not to fix your computer. No, I won’t even try. There’s a good chance of me screwing it up. There’s a better chance of you thinking that I’ll be your personal PC tech from this point in time. No time for that, sorry. There’s connectivity to the walljack? Sweet, my work here is done.
When I bend the rules to help you out faster, I’m not just letting you cut in line in front of those who planned in a timely manner, I’ll have to defend my actions to the higher-ups. I am not issuing you a permanent rules-exemption waiver. Don’t think that you’ll be fast-tracked from this point in time.
Admittedly, I do “work in IT”. I still can’t recommend a good laptop. Or a good wireless router. Or fix your computer. I’m not even that good with computers. I work in a 25x80 telnet session, like a terminal in the bad old days. I like it that way.
Yes, I see stars on the lot. No, I won’t ask for autographs. This is their workplace, and they deserve that free space they’re denied in so many other places.
I’m (almost) a pharmacist.
No, I will not get you free Vicodin from work. Or any other medication. I don’t care if you just want ibuprofen, it’s right there in the OTC section, go buy your own.
I have no idea what your insurance coverage is without your current insurance card. No, I can’t call 50 different processors to find out if you’re covered under one of their plans.
I do not have every single formulary for every single group, from every single insurance PBM memorized. I have no idea if a drug is covered under your plan unless you give me a prescription to try billing them for. No I won’t run a claim through without a prescription.
No, I do not JUST count pills and put them in a bottle. I have technicians to do that part. My job is far more involved than that.
If I tell you it’s going to be 15 minutes to fill your prescription, it’s going to be 15 minutes. I’m not saying so to be a jerk–I’m allocating time based on present work-load and the potential for problems with your prescription/insurance. No, I will not bump your prescription ahead of someone else in line just because you have to be somewhere in 5 minutes. Neither they, nor I, care that you have poor time management skills.
I could continue this list for several pages, I think.
My brother and sister, both (absurdly successful independent) pharmacists get irked by this, especially when occasionally asked “why do you have to go to school to learn how to do that?” They do both acknowledge that they’ve never needed “all those @#$*8ing chemistry classes we had to take in school”, though they say what shocks people the most is that they have both actually used a mortar and pestle in their jobs, and both say they’ve saved lives by catching potentially fatal interactions of drugs prescribed to the same patient by the same doctor.
The chemistry is what you make of it. It can be useful if you’re, say, making a recommendation on an opiate change based on what chemical structure the patient’s previous opiate was or if they have an allergy to certain chemical groups. But no, we generally don’t use it every day in a retail/hospital setting.
The thing that annoys me the most is when a patient (or their doctor) tells me that because their doctor wrote for X drug, I HAVE to give it to them. Generally speaking, no, I don’t, and yes, I have a very good reason for not doing so (like, filling it would violate a law, likely cause a fatal interaction, the directions or strength are wrong or don’t exist).
I do computer support.
That doesn’t mean I can fix your Windows machine. I’m a Unix admin, not a Windows admin. You might know more about Windows than I do- I don’t like it, so I don’t make an effort to learn more than I need to about it.
It also doesn’t mean you want me messing with your hardware. I’m very much not a hardware geek. I used to be a theoretical astrophysicist, and I’m about as handy as you’d expect the stereotypical theoretical astrophysicist to be.
I am a theatre technician.
I am not an actor.
I am not a failed actor.
I don’t have a secret burning desire to be an actor. In fact if you see me on stage, something has gone terribly wrong.
Yes I make a living off of it, it is a real job.
I work in Human Resources.
I don’t hate all of humanity and want you to suffer, it just looks that way sometimes.
Also, I am not a nurse because I couldn’t make it in medical school. I’m not dreaming of the day I can be a doctor like Abby on ER. Yes, yes… I know all about the storyline but no, I’m not interested nor are most nurses I know.