Inspired by this thread where Scarlett67 pointed out the ignorance of other people who think her job is easy because they don’t understand the job where she said:
For the record, Scarlett, I don’t think you need to feel insulted, just embarrassed for the ignorant person that thinks your job is so simple.
Me? I’m a computer programmer, and have been for almost 20 years. Frequently people fall into two catagories: Those that think I’m a data entry clerk, and those that think I’m the king of all computer knowledge. Granted I may know more about computers than “you”, but I’m really not qualified to answer your networking/virus/application/game/spam/email/password problem. Either that or I hate being used for free advice. :rolleyes:
The same was true when I was working tech support for the Tulsa City/County Library System. I’d tell people I work for the library, and I’d get such great questions as: “Do you have a book on xxxxx?” and “You work for the library? You must check out books” and my favorite that a friend of mine would ALWAYS get when he worked the front counter (He actually DID check out books), people would walk into the library (This is a 5 floor building, mind you) and would invariably ask: “Where are all the books?” Uh, could you narrow that down a little pal? Can you tell me what TYPE of book you’re looking for?
So, here’s the question. What idiotic assumptions do other people make about your job?
I’m a subeditor and I have the same problem as Scarlett67. Nowadays, if someone pulls the “spellcheck” line, I just tell them I fire up Clippy, the Microsoft Word Assistant, and spend the day in the pub. And then ask how their day went.
“It looks like you’re trying to write a newspaper article. Would you like some help?”
I work at two NPR radio stations. Over 90% of our programming comes in via satellite. People call up all the time and want to be put through to Diane Rehm, Neal Conan, Peter Sagal, Tom & Ray Magliozzi, or any of the hosts of classical music programs. These people are all far, far away and we don’t have their phone numbers. You wouldn’t believe the indignance we have to put up with when we explain that none of those people work here, and no, we can’t forward a message for you or give you contact information.
Hoo boy, I tell ya . . . oh wait, I already did. Wow, I think that’s the first time I saw my name in a thread title!
Had one once related to my avocation, which is making jewelry and selling it at summer festivals. At one particularly slow show I was sitting in my booth making earrings. I had three or four pairs in progress, with tools, bead board, beads, etc. spread all over the table. A guy came around looking for vendors for his flea market. I talked with him politely for a few minutes while I continued to work. He got to looking around at my displays, complimented the jewelry, and then said, “But you don’t make all this stuff.” It was all I could do not to roll my eyes as I held up the tools and unfinished earring that I was holding in my hands at that very moment. No, doofus, I don’t make it. I’m just the troll who tends the booth.
Another jewelry one: Chatting with the vendor next to me, I mentioned that I didn’t have a Web site; the jewelry is very much a secondary thing for me and while I do have a domain, I just haven’t gotten around to setting up a site. It’s not a priority. So my new friend starts burbling about how easy it is, all you have to do is get Microsoft FrontPage and use their nifty templates . . . Um, no. I KNOW how to make a Web page – I created and manage my friend’s – and I sure as hell wouldn’t use FrontPage and some generic template. She was obviously having trouble distinguishing CAN’T and HAVEN’T.
I’m self employed; thus some people think I have unlimited free time! Truth is I work 12 hours per day as well as most weekends. I hate it when people in my own family say “Since you don’t have to work, can you do this for me…” or “Since you have so much free time…”
Yes, I am an astronomer. No, I do not have a telescope fetish. Charming as you are, I don’t want to hear your backyard outfit described to me in excruciating, loving detail, because once you get beyond, “20 inch Dobson . . .” I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.
If you have problems with your setup, I’m really not the one to ask. Really. I don’t know how to polar align an equatorial mount. I haven’t the foggiest idea what could be causing your scattered light problem. I can’t recommend a good CCD camera. No, I don’t have a dew shield because I don’t own a telescope. I have a pair of 10x50 binoculars, one of them cute little planispheres, and a flashlight with a red gel over the lens. Trust me. You know more about telescopes than I do. Please believe me when I tell you that 99% of my telescope-using experience involves sitting in a brightly lit, warm room, and typing into a computer. I don’t build them and I can’t fix them. On the rare occasions when I get dragged out to a star party, my job is to stand next to the telescope and pontificate on astrophysics. If you want me to do more than set up a small scope on an alt-az mount and find, oh, say, the Pleiades or Mizar, you’re out of luck.
Amateur astronomers make me feel completely inadequate.
I program simulations for aircraft development. In C/C++/Ada/Fortran and the like. Exclusively on Unix boxes (just ask me 'bout my new SunBlade :D). I live, eat, and breathe in Emacs, (and other Gnu stuff). Somewhere out in the great wide world, people are apparently using something called “Windows”. I CANNOT work on, debug, de-malware, de-virus, or otherwise help you with your PC. Honest. But you continue to ask (and ask, and ask)…
I design print material on an Apple Mac. And while computers are almost magic, there is no magic button that makes everything happen automatically. And pushing that mythical button faster will not make it go any faster.
(My boss likes to come around and tell me to push the ‘raster’ button faster. It’s his idea of managing.)
I’m a vet tech in an emergency clinic, and a whole lot of people think I sit around and play with the cute little puppies and kitties all day. I do not. I restrain animals whose owners are afraid of them. I pry open the mouths of dogs who weigh as much as I do and shove pills down their throats. I mop up bloody, infectious diarrhea. I support dogs who cannot stand on their own so they can go outside. I take x-rays, pull blood and run labwork, put in catheters, induce and monitor anesthesia, put in endotracheal tubes, and do CPR on animals that are dying. I bag and tag corpses. Most of the time I go weeks at a stretch without seeing any healthy uninjured animals except my own.
The misconception was really prevalent when I was in day practice, especially among job applicants. We had several who made it through the interview just fine, but didn’t last twenty minutes into their shadowing. The two who really stick out in my mind are the one who passed out watching me prep a dog for implant removal, and the one who turned green and ran out of the room after seeing one of us give a cat a post-op antibiotic injection. The second actually told the practice manager, “I didn’t know you had to stick them with needles!” I’m still pretty unclear how she thought things like vaccines and IV fluids were going to get into the animals.
My current job has caused the following questions to be asked of me:
Can you get this virus off of my PC?
What is the best router for home networking?
Would you build a computer for me?
Can you fix my driver’s license picture?
I’m a UNIX admin with a specialization in High Availability working at a company that makes driver’s licenses. It’s even duller than it sounds.
I’m a Systems Admin/Architect for a fairly large bank, working on HP Nonstop servers. I get idiot questions all the time…
Can you fix my PC, it does XXXXX and XXXX?
I have a mortgage thru the bank you work for, could you "take care" of that for me?
I'm having a problem with Windows XP, can you help me fix it?
My cable modem is giving me a problem, can you come over and fix it for me?
Can you build me a new PC?
Can you fudge the numbers and put $1,000,000 into my bank account?
AAAUUUGHHHH!!!! I dont even work on PC's, other than for E-mail and connectivity thru an emulator. I can't make changes to anyones account and wouldnt even if I could. (I have a definite fear of jail and becoming someones bitch!!)
I'm gonna start telling people I work in the mailroom, just so the stupid questions will stop. (I'll probably get people asking me for stamps when I do that...)
It could be worse. They could ask you to cast their horoscope! :eek:
Until a couple of years ago, I worked as a financial analyst for a big telecom company. People would hear the job title and ask me stuff like, “So where should I be investing my money these days?”, and “How does a Roth IRA work?”
Then I’d have to explain that personal financial planners do stuff like that. I worked for a big corporation. I dealt with questions like “Should we invest $100 million in a network upgrade?”. Nobody ever seemed satisfied with this explanation.
I worked for Disney, in accounting. Everyone seems to assume we have the costumed characters walking around the offices all day long. Most people asked me if I was Goofy when I told them where I worked. That seemed to be the most popular character for that joke for some reason. Sure, little bluebirds deliver the interoffice mail and squirrels and other friendly woodland creatures would fetch coffee or paper clips, but you would never see any of the theme park characters wandering around.
When I was working as a graphic artist, I wanted a nickel for every time someone told me they wanted to do what I did, because it would be so fun! And so easy! Uh-huh. I should have told them I’d send them the next person who came in with some atrocious piece of ‘artwork’ that had been photocopied from a photocopy of a photocopy, asked me to ‘fix’ it, and then were very disappointed I didn’t have some magic machine hidden somewhere that could somehow make their smeary, illegible copy into an exact replica of the original (which of course had been lost at least a decade or so ago). I couldn’t then, nor can I now, despite the miracle of modern technology, make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t. I could, however, make a whole new piece of artwork to use, which, swear to God, would be much better than the old tattered piece of junk, and the really good news is that we would actually keep copies of the original file, so more good copies could be made.
Then, when I started this job as a distance learning specialist, I would get people asking me all kinds of computer questions I couldn’t answer, because it was out of the little niche of computer-related stuff I was hired for. I’ve tried explaining that computer jobs are similar to the medical jobs that many of my coworkers have experience with - there are specialties and subspecialties, and you have to be talking to the right specialist to get the best answer. Sometimes it sinks in.
I’m also the webmaster here, and our head shed’s admin assistant was very excited when said head shed appointed him to do a specific section of the site. Because it looked like fun! And it was probably easy too! He found out pretty quickly that wasn’t the case, and when he leaves for another job at the end of the week, the guy that manages the content for that section is going to give it back to me, because, as he said, ‘I think C. found it was a lot harder and more time consuming than it looked, and we can’t really ask the next admin assistant to take that on since it really isn’t part of the job.’ Now maybe someone sees why I get paid more than the admin assistants.
And really, if this stuff was so easy, then why are there so many horrible web sites out there?
Nothing since I got into the computer biz, but back when I was a geologist, people very often got it into their heads that I was somehow knowledgeable about or interested in archaeology. They kept telling me about burial sites and stuff that I should really go look at. I wasn’t interested.
Another thing geologists get all the time is “did you know this area was once covered by water?” They don’t realize that one would be pretty hard pressed to find a place on earth that wasn’t once covered by water. I always wanted to answer, “Oh. How was the fishing?” Never did, though; I’m not that rude.
Right now, I’m working as an English tutor at the University. Students and professors alike think I’m a copyeditor. I actually have students come back to me and say “My professor was really displeased with the errors. They said you should do a better job.”
I should do a better job? What about the student?
No, I do not fix grammatical errors unless they are repeated. Then I fix three as demonstration and show the student how to fix the rest when they go back and do the second draft.
Besides that, my boss made it very, very clear that I’m not to proof-read or edit papers. I can help with structure, I can help develop the ideas, I can help brain-storm, I can show them how to fix their “favorite mistakes,” I can walk them through their assignment, I can even give them comfort when they’re freaking out because they’re sure they’ll get an F and get kicked out of school. But I cannot and will not edit their paper.
Unless they want to pay me to tutor them privately.
It’s really frustrating when the professors do that though. I can understand the students, but the professors make me crazy.
I’m an artist. At arts/crafts/community fairs I do quick-sketch portraits. Other times I just paint for my own pleasure (often landscapes, which I do on-site) and I sometimes sell the results. Most of my customers are extremely nice - sometimes I even have the privilege of sharing a real art experience with someone & both of us are transformed.
But I’ve learned to keep the chatter to a minimum because too many times I’ve gotten chummy with customers & learned more than I wanted to know about their aesthetics. They’ll brag about their talented relative, a “great artist” who “can copy any photograph” (a phase I went through at age 14). Or they’ll want to impress me with their sophistication by telling me about the other art they own - a whole Thomas Kinkade collection. One guy even came back with photographs to show me of the paintings he’d purchased when they were demolishing a local hotel. He may have bought them from the Ramada, but the Ramada clearly got 'em from a “Starving Artist” sale.
Of course, the worst part is that these are people who like my work! I’m much happier not knowing that my portrait of them will be hanging proudly between Dogs Playing Poker and Black Velvet Elvis.
I am a church organist. I was about to complain to a friend about how I’m not paid enough, I’ve done this and that this past year, I passed this organ playing exam, I learned all this hard music, etc. and she said,
“Do you get paid for playing the organ?”
Wow! That was helpful!
No, I do it for free! I get up at 6:00 a.m. EVERY SUNDAY and go to church TWICE just because I like to! I NEVER visit my family for Christmas because I like to work on Christmas Eve EVERY YEAR. I never go on vacation at spring break because I want to be at church on Easter every single year, no matter what! Everyone else leaves! Everyone in church on Easter is a stranger dressed up in a pretty outfit with maybe a hat!
P.S. There is no such thing as getting a substitute for Christmas Eve or Easter. I have a colleague who is trying to get one for Christmas Eve 2005.
Nod to pepperland girl I tutored Chemistry and English (writing and composition) in college and was constantly asked “So you’re gonna write my paper right?” Uhm, no I’m going to tell you how to write it. Chemistry students never did this.
I am an RN and patients assume I am going to wait on them hand and foot even when they are perfectly able to do it themselves. If someone is too ill, weak or injured then I have no qualms bathing, toileting, feeding, medicating them.
It’s the patients that ask me to fluff their pillow and bend their straw who then get up and go out to smoke that quickly wear out my patience. They get the “You should never do for someone what they are able to do for themselves” speech.
I know it sounds a bit heartless but a lot of people have no idea what it means to be a nurse in a big hospital.
Wow, I think that’s the first time I saw my name in a thread title!