(Thx Scarlett67) What idiotic assumptions to others make about your job?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Art Director here. I swear I am not making this up:

(On Wednesday afternoon, referring to line drawings that were done by another artist almost a decade ago)
Them: “We’d like to see those (over 300) line drawings as fully rendered versions, too, just for comparison. Can you have those by this Friday?”
Me: “It’s going to take quite a bit of time to do fully rendered versions of all of these; maybe you’d like to see one or two samples before you commit to the cost and time involved in making them all fully rendered versions…”
Them: “Well, with computers and all that can’t you just run a program to make them rendered or something?”
Me: “…no.”
Them: “Huh.”

22

I almost never get asked that, except as a joke. It might just be the circles I move in My husband rubs elbows more with the Unwashed Masses, especially because his former job required him to be chatty with customers. They sometimes asked him what his wife does. He started telling them that I was an astrophysicist because they commonly confused “astronomer” and “astrologer.” Nobody expects an astrophysicist to cast horoscopes, for whatever reason.

23

Duh. Everyone knows astrophysicists read tarot cards.

24

Want to talk about jobs people make idiotic assumptions over? I’m a prison guard - I win.

Things I do not do during a typical day at work:

Kill anyone
Torture anyone
Rape anyone
Beat anyone down
Throw anyone in “The Hole”
Carry a gun, a taser, a nightstick, a cutlass, or any other weapon
Bury any corpses that died under mysterious circumstances
Smuggle drugs into work
Extort bribes
Wear a white sheet or a Nazi uniform
Arrange for prisoners to fight each other in gladiatorial combat
Make deals with the high powered prisoners who really run things
Generally oppress poor misunderstood people who are innocent victims of an uncaring society that doesn’t understand them because they’re rebels looking to go their own way while not hurting anyone else

Things I do during a typical day at work:

Paperwork
Answer telephone calls
Answer radio calls
Answer questions
Make telephone calls
Make radio calls
Ask questions
More paperwork
Eat lunch
Walk around the prison and talk to people
Listen to prisoners complain about other prisoners
Check other people’s paperwork

25

I’m down with your entire post, except the part about not carrying a weapon. Unless you work in a minimum-security facility, this surprises me. I’d love to be further educated!

26

I have this same problem. I’m a copywriter and I work from home. When I first started last January, my family kept waiting for me to get a “real” job. Even though they finally stopped telling me, “Um, don’t you think you should get a real job?” or “Isn’t it nice that your hobby gets you money.” or “Wow, you stay at home all day? Your house must be spotless!” (because I guess all I do is clean) they still think that, because I work from home, I must be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want. Not so. I run a business, and the business often runs me. I don’t have an administrative, marketing and accounting department, and there’s no one to delegate my work to. Yeah, I occasionally get to run errands in the middle of the day, and my time is often more flexible than others’; however, I work harder and longer hours than I ever have before.

27

Word. I’ve been fortunate, though, in that most of my friends are also self-employed in one way or another, and they understand what self-employment is all about. And after Mr. S got the can from his much-better-paying job, and I had to kick it up a few notches and now make more than he did, I gots me a little more respect. :smiley:

28

I work for a wine company. Lots of people work in the wine industry in one capacity or another in this area.
The question I seem to get often is “So, do you drink wine all day long?” Well, no, I don’t sit around drinking wine all day. I save that for when I get home.
Mainly it’s the winemakers jobs to taste the wines, and they don’t even drink them, they spit them out. Occasionally we’ll have tastings at work, but it’s rare, and that’s only in this building, as I sit a few offices down from the winemaster’s lab.

And people assuming I’m some kind of wine connoisseur. Until being in this position for 4 years now, I knew pretty close to nothing about wine, except its effects on me. I’m constantly learning (by being around people with vasts amount of knowledge on the different aspects, and in my personal time by reading and experimenting), and appreciating much more than I ever expected to, it has become a hobby as well as a career, but I’m certainly not an expert. More often than not, I could tell you more about the bottle than the wine that’s in it. =)

29

I work in a hospital as a Registered Nurse.
Although I do give shots and help patients up to the bathroom and do what the doctors tell me…sometimes…I’ve never dated a doctor. I don’t wear a white dress and cap. I don’t give sponge baths. I’ve never placed an air bubble in an intravenous line that silently travled to the heart and killed a patient.

But I am hot. That’s one of the few things TV and the movies get right about nurses.
The scenes in “Meet The Parents” when the doctors meet Greg Focker and disrespect him for being a male nurse…a decent doc shouldn’t have it in him to look down on a ER triage RN; they save too many lives.
“Will and Grace”'s depiction of Jack’s nursing school experiences and graduation…I hate thinking that’s America’s idea of nursing students.

Cyn, OB/GYN RN

30

I used to work as a photo retoucher. People routinely assumed that all photos were airbrushed. No, the airbrush was rarely used. We used photo dyes and a watercolor paintbrush, and painted each print by hand (very thin, watery dyes tinted the prints). Now most photo retouching is done on the computer, with Photoshop. But people still talk about “airbrushing” photos.

I do pottery. People will talk about how “peaceful” pottery must be, with that gracefully spinning, spinning, spinning wheel. No, it’s a messy wheel, fighting the clay to keep it centered on that wheel, dealing with slimy, cold, caking clay, and hoping you can get the pot off the wheel without it (the pot) not going all lopsided.

I do a little calligraphy. People assume that all there is to calligraphy is getting that wedge-shaped pen. “All you do is write with that pen, right?” No. You have to learn to keep the pen at the right angle at all times, learn to form the letters just so, etc. etc. It took me quite a while to learn how to do it properly. It’s a lot more than just writing the way you normally do, but with a wedgy pen.

31

My agency does about 80 percent of its business in online advertising. I always tell people I’m in the ad business, rather than the online ad business, because I always get questions like…

Do you make those pop-ups come up on my computer? (No.)

Do you send all those porno e-mails? (No.)

I hate that spyware. Is that you? (No.)

Even worse is when people assume that since I’m in this business, I automatically know how to fix everything on their PC.

32

I design video games.

A lot of people seem to think that this means that I sit around all day playing video games.

Actually I spend most of my day writing design documents. Or talking with the artists and engineers.

When I do play the work-in-progress, it’s not fun.

Imagine the worst video game you’ve ever played. Now strip out all the pretty models and replace them with chunky gray placeholders. Remove all the sounds and music. Break the animation system. Make it so it randomly locks up and crashes every fifteen minutes.

Now play the same level over and over for hours at a time, slightly tweaking the settings. Agonize about how you’re responsible for this boring pile of crap.

Aw … who am I kidding? It’s still a blast.

33

Some years ago, I did a lot of calligraphy, and made some money at it too. Did a number of things like captions in wedding albums, customized greeting cards, names on diplomas, and other special things. Of course, I also did some larger works that I wanted to do just for myself–favourite quotations, in an appropriate alphabet, usually with a decorative border of some sort. All done by hand, of course.

It was the latter that contributed to me decision to stop doing calligraphy. People kept asking for the larger sort of works, but they weren’t willing to wait for them, or pay my asking price. “It can’t take that long; you’re just writing carefully,” they’d say, or “Oh, it can’t be that much money.” No, it took a lot more than just “writing carefully,” and it did take a long time. Enough time to justify (to me, anyway) charging an appropriate price.

What finally got me was a friend who wanted to present a colleague with a long Shakespeare soliloquy. He had the specifics already: it was to be in a particular alphabet, and have a hand-painted border similar to one he had found in a calligraphy book. Oh, and it had to be done in a week. Hey, he’d be nice and buy me a beer for it.

I said No, and have done very little calligraphy since. Most people I know nowadays don’t know I ever did it.

34

“You get to sit around and play videogames all day? That must be a fun!”

Oh. I see on preview that Pochacco already got mine. Ah well, it’s still a valid point and a dumb question. I would’ve been able to post sooner, had I not spent the last three hours between meetings and writing documents.

35

I used to work in nuclear power for the gov’t. Well for the Navy.

Every time I told someone that they’d ask: Aren’t you afraid of being so close to a <shudder> reactor?

No, you moron. Only three people in the US have ever been killed by a reactor accident, and the SL-1 incident seems, based simply on the physics, to have been the result of a deliberate act. On the other hand, everyone I knew working in the engineroom was scared stiff of two more common things: Steam and fire. The USS Dhalgren fire happened while I was in, as did the USS Iwo Jima incident. At least the fire on the Dhalgren left the crew with the chance to run. On the Iwo Jima, they just got cooked alive. The lucky (?) ones managed to escape the engineroom before dying in sickbay a few hours later. Now that’s what scared us.

Scarlett67, have you ever explained to those people the joy of homonyms? Or that without an intelligent read through a spell checker can still leave behind great errors. I got a note from my landlord this summer that went through a spellchecker. He was talking about how anyone having a BBQ on the porches would be reported to the cops, after all, he had

Podkayne, is it still true that astronomy remains a field where the knowledgeable amateur can still make signifigant contributions? I recall, before computer searches of astrophotography, that most comets were being found by backyard astronomers to pick one example.

36

I am a contract investigator for the US Office of Personnel Management.

I am not the FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service, or using this job as any sort of covert ops cover. I just gather the information that somebody else uses to determine your eligibility to begin or maintain Federal employment. I have no say whatsoever in your determination. My reports are written as mechanically and formulaic as possible.

I wrote a big long ranting entry, then realized half of it is probably things that I’m supposed to keep confidential. So away it all went. Yes, I have to keep secrets. No, I don’t need to kill you if I tell you.

37

Computer system engineer for the phone company here…

I manage servers. I am not a guru on HTML, programming, routers, databases, networks, PC’s, Windows, Mac’s, Photoshop, Microsoft products, Everquest, Flight Simulator, Antivirus, Spamware, telephones, your nephew’s school project. Yes, I do know a little about all these things and a lot about some of them. Yes, I probably know more than you about them. But I don’t know everything and I can’t fix all your problems.

I’m willing to share knowledge, as far as it is convenient for me. And a little beyond that, even. You will only feel the fulness of my fury if you say…

“You’re a computer guy, why can’t you explain this to me? I can go to Borders and buy a book that will teach me this in 7 days.”
So go invest your own time and money to buy the fucking book and read it for 7 days.

OR

*“I could do this myself but I don’t have time to teach myself everything.”*Oh. So you’re telling me that your time is more valuable than mine. Thanks asshole, next time it’ll be billable hours.

OR

*“Ever since you worked on my machine, it’s been acting funny.”*Well, the reason you called me is that it was acting funny. My fix didn’t work? You get what you pay for. Fix it yourself, or pay to have it done.

OR

“My computer doesn’t work.”
And? If you want an answer, you’ll have to phrase your question in the form of a question.

“It must be nice to have an office job and sit at a desk all day.”
Listen jerk, a nice job is where you can sleep 7 hours a night, every night, without being paged to fix something. I work business hours like everyone else, and I get paged in the middle of the night, and I have to do system upgrades at 2AM on Saturday so that people like you won’t bitch at our call centers because the systems are down during your lunch break.

Gosh, I could go on and on…

I know I’m guilty of asking people for professional advice, but I don’t grill them in depth, and I offer an exchange of services if desired.

38

Oh, believe me, they get the whole spiel. When I work electronically, I do run spell check at various stages, but that is about 1/1,000 of the work involved. It catches typos and saves me the trouble of fixing them by hand, and that’s about it. I also tell them about the multiple passes I make through a manuscript, the art of tactful querying, the extensive style sheets I create for each project, the egregious factual and logical errors I’ve caught, and on and on.

No, I don’t have to work all the problems in the math books I edit. That’s what technical editors and peer reviewers do. But they might not notice (or care) whether all the variables are italic/roman as needed, and they won’t make sure that’s a Greek lowercase nu instead of a lowercase italic v, or that the exercises are all numbered consecutively. That’s my job. (I have caught errors in exercises now and then, but that’s just gravy and not expected.)

No, I’m not going to correct your grammar during our conversation. I’m a copyeditor, not a lout.

39

I work for Hallmark, but this probably also applies to retail places that have a designated “holiday” asile or area. Whenever I take down a completed season people are always griping about how the next season is “too early!” “forcing it down our throats!” “trying to make more money by extending the season!”

Uh, no. It’s going up now because the other season is over and the alternative is a huge, empty rack. (Aside from that, for every 3 people who gripe about something being out too early, there’s someone bouncing up and down behind me while I finish setting up a display because they can’t WAIT to start shopping it! I’ve had people start yanking stuff out of the plastic before it’s even set up!)

40

“You’re a teacher? That’d be sweet: you’re off work at 3PM, and you get all those summers off!”