Inspired by one of George Carlin’s all-time favorite subjects …
We’ve all heard them: job titles which seem to have abdicated the common vernacular we all identify them with. I can’t recall the last time I called a garbageman a “Streets and Sanitation Technician”, a programmer a “Senior Software Engineer”, or a housewife a “Domestic Logistics Specialist”. Okay, so those are progressively more and more farfetched, but it seems like the more thankless a job is perceived to be, the bigger the title becomes so as to soften the demeaning nature of it.
Dopers are more crafty with euphemistic sarcasm than any other crowd I know, so let’s hear your favorite euphemisms … preferably job-related, but feel free to contribute if you have a particularly non-job-title-related one. Make one up. Pimp your own job title to make yourself sound more important than you are, even. Me? I’m not a transcriptionist, I’m an Executive Administrative Accreditation Technical Design Coordinator. That means I update medical records on a lousy computer at a big educational institution and print lots of documents. Well, I do right now, anyway. My previous title was a lot shorter and paid better.
Well, this isn’t a job title, but it’s job related.
My boss regularly receives complaints from Centralized Maintenance and the Field Offices regarding any screwups we’ve made at the Call Center.
He calls these complaints ‘‘coaching opportunities.’’ As in, ‘‘I have a big stack of coaching opportunities to go through at today’s meeting.’’
Additionally, if something in our office is ‘‘Centrally Fulfilled,’’ this means it was placed in an envelope, stamped, and mailed. I wish I was making that up.
Okay, but you’re still just a programmer. An engineer is someone who sits at a drafting table with a slide rule (or perhaps a CAD workstation) with a white shirt and black tie and a degree from an accredited engineering school hanging on the wall, perhaps next to their state license to operate in their applied industry. They design cars, trains, missiles, water reclamation systems, nuclear power plants and space shuttles. Programmers write the code that makes those things run. Engineers do hardware and programmers do software, and no job title can change that.
Well, you can debate whether or not software people are entitled to be called “engineers” but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a real job title used by hundreds of organizations around the country. It’s not a euphemism, like “Domestic Logistics Specialist” or some of the other titles in this thread.
When I was a janitor, some people thought it was witty to call me a “sanitary engineer.” I would work up some mock outrage. “I’ve been called some nasty shit, but don’t call me an engineer! I have cleaned up after engineers, and they are the sloppiest creatures in the building.” I am a solid waste technician. I am a surface specialist. I am a germ slayer. I am NOT an engineer." Da nerve o’ dem guys. :rolleyes:
I am my husband’s job search agent when he’s looking for a new job. He does CAD work for biotech facilities and space planning. I really have to stay on top of whatever the hell it is they’re calling his position this month.
For instance, for his space planning work, I must use all of these search terms:
and others I can’t even remember right now. God knows what new term they’ll invent for this next month.
I remember once when I searching for a CAD drafter job for him, a position called “facilities coordinator” came up. It was CAD drafting, but the job had little to do with facilities and nothing to do with coordinating, so I have no idea what fuckwit came up with this term.
All of this nonsensage caused me to once think that an opening I saw called “Vacuum Engineer” was a glorified description of a janitor’s job.
We have people here called “animal husbandry technicians” or “animal care technicians” It’s a nice way to describe a job that is basically feeding, watering, and cleaning up rat/mouse/pig/sheep shit out of the cages and then putting the animal back in said cage.
I love sandwich artist. I always wanted a name tag from subway with my name on it under “sandwich artist”
Those are civil or mechanical engineers. I don’t like the term “engineer” applied to computer science people unless they are actually designing and building hardware or high level software like operating systems or whatnot.
At a dot-com web design (ecommerce strategy :rolleyes: ) consulting firm I worked at back in the 90s, they called technical project managers “architects”. I thought that was a stupid pretentious term. What are you going to do? Go around telling people you are an architect so they think your like freakin I M Pei or something and then have to explain that you project manage web page building?
At Disney, every employee is (or used to be) called a “cast member” regardless if you worked as Goofy or in the accounting department.
Precisely why I said they’re programmers rather than engineers or architects. A rose by any other name is still a rose. I don’t care if the term is commonplace in tons of job titles. Software engineer is a euphemism just like administrative assistant, sanitation technician, or sandwich artist. Those all get used by hundreds of organizations around the country too, but they’re still just secretaries, garbagemen, and food clerks … and people who write software are still just programmers. At the end of the day, engineers build stuff and programmers make it work, so let’s try not to take it personally that programmers aren’t something else. Ever seen any engineers who go around touting themselves as programmers? Me neither. That’s why it’s a euphemism for programmers to call themselves engineers.
I used to have the title “Manager, Strategic Accounts” which was a euphamism for “someone who puts up with peoples shit that no one else will.”
I am currently a “card room employee” according to my state license. I guess you could say I am an “analyzer and re distributer of non-organic compounds” i.e. poker dealer. In real life, I’m the one who screws you on the river. (Aquatic Intercourse Technician?)
