And if you’re an English grad student, the follow-up is either:
“Well! I’d better watch my grammar around you!”
or (conspiratorial whisper):
“So, who really wrote Shakespeare, hmm?”
If you’re a copywriter:
“You want me to pay you more than $7 per hour? My secretary could write that and I wouldn’t have to pay her extra!”
Then why the hell did you ask me for an estimate in the first place?
If you write magazine articles or stories:
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to write, too. I just don’t have as much time as you do.”
Thanks, jerk. It’s my job. Just like you, I complete the duties of my job. Just 'cause I don’t have a traditional one doesn’t mean I haven’t got one.
Oh, and on writing erotica:
“You must be obsessed with sex. You’ve got to have a really dirty, perverted mind to write garbage that.”
My mind’s no dirtier than yours. I just happen to translate it better onto paper. And I manage to sell it now, too. Oh, by the way, thanks for letting me check my e-mail on your computer, but you might want to delete all that porn from your hard drive before your wife finds it.
Television/Film production.
We can always tell the newbies/semi-pros when they use the term “filming” when we’re shooting video. Even if we’re shooting film we usually just say we’re “shooting”.
Oh yeah, another one. When the camera is rotated left to right, it’s called panning. When it’s tilted up and down it’s called aptly called tilting. Newbies just call it all panning. Can get a little confusing on the set sometimes.
Bah, we all know you’r a mute. 
I’m afraid to think how they describe crab/truck or dolly moves. “Pan in, wil ya?”
In the life of an information security administrator, at least once a week someone will perk up and ask me “Oh! Can you fix my daughter’s AOL?” <shudder>
First-year undergrad at University of Toronto. Good to meet you 
Personally – Try to fix this up but don’t spend any more money or time on it.
Okay, I guess I’m done then.
Organizationally – Why don’t they just get a job and their own helath insurance?
I work for an advocacy organization that deals a lot with health care issues. The reason they don’t get a job is because there’s a 26.4% unemployment rate in their county, Wal-Mart is the last viable company in town and they aren’t hiring any more people. The reason they don’t get their own health insurance is because a) it would cost them more than $4K per year and b) they can’t get it at any price because the insurance company won’t provide insurance because they have cancer/heart disease/severe arthritis/kidney disease/lead poisoning/you name it.
“You’re an astronomer? So, like, what’s my sign?”
There’s a reason we’re calling ourselves “astrophysicists” now.
[QUOTE=CrazyCatLadyAnd my personal favorite:
“Oh, he bites us all the time.”[/QUOTE]
From a related field:
“What, you’re gonna charge us to take a dog from the pound? You oughtta PAY us for saving him!”
Err, yeah. We’re charging you to finance our second yacht, sir. This is a great profit-making venture we’re in here, running a shelter, and that seventy bucks you’ll pay to adopt a dog covers almost two thirds of the cost we’ve incurred housing it! C’mon big money!
Daniel
Bean counter checking in…
-
"Well the Kelley Blue Book price is … " (KBB is NOT a valid resource for determining the value of a car–read the disclaimer that comes with their quote sometime)
-
“My car is worth more than the average price–they only made 3,000 of them!” (if the car’s unavailability is a factor in its price, don’cha think it would also affect the value of the other 2,999 in pretty much the same way?)
I had a friend who’s an astronomer (sorry, astrophysicist), who got tired of people assuming that he spent most of his time looking through an optical telescope. He also quit telling people his specialty (supernovae) because of the nonsense that it always seemed to engender.
Web/print/multimedia design:
“$5000? I can do a site myself in Frontpage!”
“My neighbor’s kid can do it for $10 a page, AND he’ll animate my logo.”
“How much to design a website? I don’t know how big it’ll be or what will be on it yet, though.”
“Why doesn’t more stuff move on the site?”
“I want everyone who visits to see the flash intro every time. Of course no skip button!”
“Can’t you write all the copy for the site/ad/doc yourself?”
“Wow, you’re a great designer! We’d like you to work with our designer; he doesn’t know how to do websites but design is design, right? So he’ll do the design and you make it into a website.”
“While you’re at it, can you design our company’s logo? That won’t cost extra, right?”
“Can you do the site in Flash?” *(Ok, maybe it’s just me that rolls my eyes at this…) *
If it makes you feel any better, I loathe overly-animated Flash sites. They drive me nuts. Just because your designer knows how to make everything move on your site doesn’t mean they should. And if they must, then at least offer an escape button so they can move onto the actual site rather then be stuck watching crap bounce all over the screen.
“Oh, that’s alright, dear. I’ll just wait for the doctor.” (after asking what problem the patient is here for.)
“I don’t really know what medications I’m taking. It’s for my heart and my diabetes, though. Does that help?”
“Can’t you just give me a pill for it?”
Also, analogies of cars to human bodies. For some reason, there’s an assumption that everyone should heal at the same rate in the same way. GAH! Cars. Are. Not. People. I cannot tell you exactly how fast you will heal or how well. That part’s up to you.
Um, why? All the linguistics folks I knew at school had multiple languages.
–Cliffy
People who do legitimate health-related massage are now called Massage Therapists. A “masseuse” is someone like Candi’s Heavenly Hands Massage.
“We can’t spend $3,000 on a pony! But our neighbor has a foal we can have for $300. I’m going to buy it so my 8 year-old, inexperienced child and it can grow up together! No, I have no experience training young horses… why do you ask?”
Not enough :rolleyes: in the universe for this plan.
I forgot to add, there’s even a slogan that describes the results of this idea:
green + green = black & blue.
(green being a term for an inexperienced horse or rider)
People ask this because they believe that studying linguistics is learning multiple languages, rather than studying their structure.
Most of the people in my linguistics program spoke English and maybe French. Just because you study Malagasy doesn’t mean you necessarily speak it.
(And yes, this question was always additionally embarrassing for me because I actually do speak five languages, so I couldn’t say “one” and forestall further comment. I usually stammered out, “Well, linguistics isn’t just learning languages - it’s the study of language itself,” or some similar platitude.)