I’m a nurse, so everyone *thinks *they know what I do. But I’m a home health nurse, so really, it’s nothing like the nursing that most people are familiar with. I haven’t placed an IV in two years (if I got an IV case, I’d have to practice up on my husband before I tried it on a patient.). I’ve never drawn blood. Haven’t done a Foley in well over a year. I do about 50 injections a year, mostly flu shots and Vit B12 injections. I can figure out an IV pump, but it’s going to take some staring and fiddling first. I might talk to the doctor once a month, and always by phone. I can go months without seeing another nurse or doctor.
So what do I do? A *lot *of education. A lot of getting people to understand exactly what their diagnoses are and what they mean, short and long term, for their health. A lot of convincing people to take their medications (mostly by educating them on what they are and what they’re for and noting from one week to the next very specifically the positive impact I see when they’ve taken them or the negative impact if they haven’t). Some wound care, which is a nice hands-on opportunity. A lot of psychiatric monitoring and sometimes light counseling. I’m not a psych nurse, but everyone’s got a little bit of psych need, sooner or later. A lot of finding resources for family members, or helping them make the home safe for the patient, or teaching them how to care for the patient. I can refill and program intrathecal pain pumps, but it doesn’t come up often; that’s the most high tech thing I do.
I do the stuff nurses in the hospital did 40 years ago, when your insurance would pay for you to stay long enough to learn what was really going on and what you should do about it. I do the stuff country doctors did 150 years ago, before there was much they could do in the way of medication prescription.
Makes training new hires interesting. Even experienced nurses don’t quite know what to do when your job suddenly isn’t all about the technology and efficiency.
Yes to all of the above, except operators like they were back in the day still exist but they are rare. Most tape storage is now virtual tape; cartridges with 10 miles of tape that contain thousands of “virtual” tape reels and cartridges that to the user looks like an individual unit but inside the machine it is just a segment of a much longer tape. The technology drastically cut back the footprint of vintage tape storage.
Search for mainframe jobs on the popular job boards and you will get a lot of hits.
I have a degree in social psychology and I work for a company that does behavioral research for public service campaigns, mostly. I am not, nor have I ever been, a clinical or counseling psychologist of any kind. I don’t do therapy. I can’t tell you what to do about your rotten kid or your crazy boyfriend. People hear “psychology” and, that’s it.
Since I work in regulatory law, almost everything I say makes people’s eyes glaze over. We had a spirited argument in the office recently: which is longer, the Talmud, or the Rules of the City of New York?
You see, the Talmud is said to be 6200 standard pages long; RCNY has 71 volumes, each at least 100 pages, however, the printing size is smaller than standard. It also depends if you count both Mishnah and Genera, and, if you count both, should the Administrative Code of the City of New York also be counted?
If you think this debate is both interesting and amusing, you may have a future in regulatory law.
Seriously? Federal Acquisition Regulations with DFAR and NASA supplements, TINA, ITAR requirements, CAS reporting, DCAA and GAO audit guidelines, SBA Size and Socio-economic challenge classsifications as defined by NAICS Code, and even still the occasional Mil-SPEC. . .
I do have a couple of foxhole buddies who understand parts of it though, being in the same business. But they all call me when they have a question. . .
I make the stuff that makes engine oils work. Specifically, I make the detergent in there. This would seem easy to understand – people are familiar with cars requiring oil, and know what dish or clothes detergents do – alas, no.
If I actually try to describe what I do, for example, when I get a call from the plant asking how to correct some failing analysis, they get completely confused; it may as well be magic to them. I may just tell people what I told my nephews I did when they were little: “I’m a wizard. I make potions at work.”
When I try to explain what I do people get confused until I say, “We’re just like Enron except that we only use our own money, so it doesn’t do us any good to lie about it.”
Unless you have worked on the sales side of a car dealership, it is really hard to explain what I do in a succinct manner. I’m not in a dealership anymore, but the company I work for handles first responses to internet leads coming into a dealer from sources like the manufacturer’s website, KBB, Edmunds, financing sites, service appointments, OnStar generated service reminders, etc.
Dealerships are slowly coming around to this whole internet thing and figuring out that it’s not a fad. People who send inquiries through online sources are just as serious about buying cars as people walking in through the doors. Someone has to answer those leads. In the recent past there has been one person at the dealership with a blackberry that was responsible for answering all the leads. I don’t know about other manufacturer’s but GM dealers get a monthly bonus if their lead response time is under a certain time limit. That person at the dealership had to answer leads 24 hours a day.
My company does that for them. We operate 24/7/365 with live people. What is hard to get people to understand is that I am not typing out responses to each lead and answering questions or selling cars. I am a proofreader and editor. We see the canned auto-response the dealership uses for service or sales and then if needed tailor it by acknowledging comments from the customer. I see and send over 600 leads in a 9 hour shift with an average response time of around 40 seconds.
I add things or subtract things or change things, plus I send flags to support if there are typos or grammar errors in the templates. (The dealers write these things and some of them are God awful.) My mother-in-law always asks if I was busy with a lot of customers today and my father-in-law thinks I’m answering phones. My laptop is just a temporary stop for the internet lead to make sure it’s correct before the response gets back to the dealership’s customer. Our customer is the dealership.
I also get to do this from home in my pajamas while watching TV.
My job title is Quality Analyst, so when people ask me now I just say I do quality assurance for an internet company.
For several years I was working for a type manufacturer. My job was to ascertain letter spacing and kerning valuesfor every font they manufactured . . . about 6,000 at that time. You can still see some of my work when you go to “optical kerning” for a font.
That was then and this is now. Now I’m an artist, and the art that I produce is difficult to describe in words. First, imagine a large surface, say 3 feet by 4 feet. Imagine that the surface is covered with small areas, like tiles. Except that they’re not necessarily square, or not even necessarily rectangles. Now imagine that there’s an image covering all the “tiles,” like a jigsaw puzzle. This image is actually a photograph that’s been transformed in various ways in Photoshop. The image for each tile is a piece of the overall image that has been printed, laminated and mounted on foam core, then glued to the surface. In some of my work, the tiles overlap like fish scales, or perhaps they are rotated different amounts . . . always keeping the overall image intact, again, like a jigsaw puzzle. To do this, I have to print each tile individually, while constantly rotating the image before each print.
My job is to sell overpriced accounting software to people who have no right being behind a register, much less owning a business. As such, I’ve learned how to dumb things down to a level where people understand what I do.
I just wish they would understand just how exhausting it is to carry on 3 conversations at a time via chat, without lying, while convincing these people to purchase or buy software they may or may not need.
Following up my earlier post about Real Life as a college prof, there’s a new report about how much work is actually involved. Long form. Short form (HuffPo).
I assumed we do very similar work. That’s fairly close to my job these days. After 10 years of HW/SW design, board bringup, etc…for cell phones.
The take-away from my non-engineering friends and family: So you can fix my computer? Um…yeah, I could, if you had a problem with your I2C bus. Unlikely.
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I run a pick and place machine. Does anyone want to know what that means?
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I’ve spent way too many hours on a factory floor.
(programs/runs the machine that populates the circuit board. It’s impressive to watch in action!)
