Occassionally, people will try to show their knowledge of newspapering and do just the opposite.
Saying things like “I bet you’re looking for a scoop.” (the word scoop has not been used by newspaper people since the early 1930s). Or saying that a photographer will have to “soup” his film. (Even the smallest newspaper these days has gone digital and doesn’t use film).
Or commenting that, “I bet this will stop the presses.” (Nothing stops the presses these days).
Having a complaint about an ad and demanding to speak to the editor to correct the problem. (Editors only have control over the news side - not the ads).
What about in your field? What phrases give a person away as a poser.
“I want your help,” the woman told me. “But before I ask for it, I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do, and you’re not gonna like it, but I’m gonna do it anyway.”
“Ohhkay,” I said. “What would you like our help with?”
“I’m gonna get my cat spaded. You can help with that, right?”
“Absolutely! You just need to come down and fill out–”
“But before I do that, I’m gonna breed her so I can get some kittens. And I know you don’t like that, but I’m gonna do it anyway.”
“That’s fine; we recommend spaying your cat before she has a litter, but–”
“Now here’s my plan. She’s half-Siamese and half something else. And her brother’s also half-Siamese and half something else. So I’m gonna breed them together so that I can get some fullblooded Siamese. Will that work?”
At that point, my head exploded, so I don’t know what she said next.
People call me up all the time asking questions about zoning and in particular if their lot is “Buildable.”
Well, folks, there is no relevancy to that word. We don’t use it and no one person here can field that question anyway. The zoner has no clue if the health dept will nix your septic permit. A planner (me) doesn’t know if your roof type meets the new hurricane codes, and the permitters don’t know if the future land use category permits the number of units you desire. Any one of these things can bring your home building to a screeching halt. Of course, Each of them will let you know what you can do to meet the standards that they deal with. And we do talk to each other to find out some of these questions on a regular basis. In fact, that’s the preferred method since it means getting an answer much quicker than rejecting the applicant and referring them to the appropriate person.
A real developer learns the process very quickly whereas the ma-and-pa types make up the bulk of our angry, gub’mint bashing, phone sessions.
Ah, this reminds me of Tim Digby’s “Little Teeny Eyes”:
[excerpt]
So we got an expert genius to reprogram the computer
But we always got results that looked like these:
"Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print
Like you need little teeny license plates for bees.
Just look 'em straight in they eye and say in your most monotone voice, “I’m sorry, ____. I’m afraid I can’t do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”
For me, it’s when people start “quoting” the laws of thermodynamics, or applying statistical terminology in ways that just do not apply. No, that booster isn’t going to become unstable because of the third law of thermodynamics; it is going to become unstable because the CG is way too far aft. No, “entropy” does not cause people to make mistakes; your lack of documented procedures and training causes most of your errors. And if I have to sit through another Six Sigma class in which they continue to ignore the effect of sample populations and mangle basic statistical concepts (while protesting that they’re a “Black Belt”, not a statistician :rolleyes: ) I’m going to take up tomahawk throwing.
Well, it’s not a word or phrase but architects are often depicted at desks, still using T-Squares.
Even the most out of date architect I know of doesn’t use a T-Square. Typically hand drawing (when it is done) is done using a Mayline (a parallel drawing ruler).
Architects are often depicting with building models. Granted, they are used still but not as often as depicted. If they are used, typically they are for big budget buildings and not homes.
Old job, but when I worked for a Private Investigator… well, just take any cliché about P.I.s and forget it. It’s nothing like Sam Spade, Magnum P.I., or any other two-bit, romanticized, fictional Private Investigator. Actually, when I worked there I told people I worked as a video editor (which was true).
Still…
Good P.I. terms (as used by our firm): Pretext (used as a noun or verb), C.A.M (Concealment, Access, Mobility), CAM Meetings (Case Assignment Meetings… redundant), Claimant/Subject (the one being investigated), and “Getting Made” (the one Hollywood term that we actually use).
Bad terms: Too numerous to mention, but I bet you can think of several.
Most often a giveaway that an individual knew nothing about the industry was any indication they gave that they thought the job was exciting/interesting or even high paying. Ha!
“Where’s the nursery?! I wanna peek in the window and see all the babies!”
People watch too much TV. The babies are in the room with their mothers. The ones who are not doing so hot are in the NICU, neonatal intensive care unit, and those nurses aren’t kind to strangers.
Well … it’s like playing the crappiest game you’ve ever played, over and over again, with all the artwork replaced with gray blocks … and it crashes every fifteen minutes.
And that’s on days when I do level blockouts or tuning.
Otherwise my job mostly consists of writing endless design docs: here’s how the combat system works, here’s a gameplay timeline for that platform section, here’s a sketch of the layout of that village, here’s a list of all the voice assets we need … .
I enjoy it mind you … it’s just not what most people imagine.
When a “college professor” claimed he was personally able to give a student back his tuition, my BS detector went off.
When a very bright academician explained his ideas for workable solutions for today’s classrooms and suggested that it would be practical for a teacher to assign a grade to a student based on the teacher’s overall evaluation of that student, I suspected that the gentleman had little or no classroom experience and had certainly never had a parent-teacher conference in any neighborhoods I’d taught in!
When any teacher claims to have done lesson plans a year in advance, that sounds pretty fishy. You are supposed to adjust your plans according to the needs of the students.
Besides, who knows when your class will be interrupted by a bomb threat, a fire, snow, yearbooks, trespassers, an irate principal, a student in labor, a student with a phobia of people who can bend their fingers at the last knuckle, firecrackers, egg-throwing, film crews for the local news, a football player wearing a skirt, a farting contest, an invasion of wasps, 110 degree classroom temperatures, armed student removal, doughnut sales, career day, death, and The Voice From the Wall.
All of this and much, much more happened to me. Not only does a teacher work around these things, but she or he incorporates some of them into the plans.
Funny, in my experience it seems to be exactly the opposite. When I tell people I’m a game programmer, a few times I’ve gotten the response “Wow! I’d be such a great game designer, I’ve got this great idea…” No, sorry, it doesn’t really work that way. With few exceptions, nobody’s going to pay you just to think of ideas for games; good game ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s actually implementing the games and coming up with the code to make them tick that’s the vast majority of the work, in my experience. (YMMV)
Speaking of game programming, one of the other guys on the team I’m on* clearly has no idea what he’s doing but tries to mask it with phrases that he obviously doesn’t know the meaning of. He’s doing the physics system for our game, which is a shame, because it became obvious early on that he knows absolutely nothing about physics, among other things. On his first attempt at the gravity function, he had a function that took the current time as a parameter and set the object’s velocity to (time * time), which would’ve set the position to the 3rd integral of time rather than the actual velocity. Then he did the same thing again by creating a variable in the Object class called “MovingAccel” which was actually used as a velocity rather than an acceleration. It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, especially listening to him trying to describe how his code works. (I should stop now before I start ranting. One of these days, I should start a pit thread about this guy, I could go on for pages and pages.)
I’m currently attending DigiPen Institute of Technology, taking classes and making games. The game I’ve been working on for the last 7 months is a week away from completion!
I told my co-workers that if they’re ever at a conference or sales presentation and the speaker’s written reference is to “HIPPA” instead of “HIPAA”, they’d might as well leave the room because the person likely doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
(For those of you not in health care, HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountabilty Act of 1996, known way back then as Kennedy-Kassebaum, and now sometimes the bane of our existence…)
