oh, ***you’re ** * the one. :dubious:
You make rap recordings? 
Seriously - “normal” teenagers? You expect us to believe this?
I sit in class all day, staring out the window, making up amusing/tragic backstories for my fellow students and thinking of things I’d like to purchase.
Then I go to the library and try to teach myself what the prof could have, if I wasn’t wondering if he was married/good in bed/a zombie pirate ninja/etc.
Then, I go to work, where I feed crappy booze to stupid people and listen to loud, soulless music. I wear clothing that enhances my cleavage, and make good money. I bite my tongue when people order piss-in-a-bottle but call it Coors Light or MGD. I pretend to drink the beverages that drunk guys buy for me. When men insist on getting my phone number and I know they won’t leave me alone until they have it, I toss out some stripper-esque name (Maya, Laeticia, Candy, etc.) and give them the number 331-3603; which would be the number for the Vancouver Public Library. I check the bathrooms for girls puking/doing E/doing their boyfriends/applying too much pink sparkly lip gloss and tell them they can’t do that here. I joke around with the bouncers and try to avoid their fits of roid-rage. When it’s all over, I go home, get a few hours sleep, wake up to a whining kitten, guzzle vast amounts of caffeine, and head back to class to sleep/doze/daydream.
It sounds a nice life, for awhile anyway.
Amaranta, I want your life.
Mine? It is what it is. I hope it didn’t sound like too much whining; I’m certainly loving this care- and responsibility-free phase I’m in while it lasts. There’s not a lot of highs or lows, and I’m living pretty much the same life as anyone my age, but it’s ok. How often in your life do you really not HAVE to do anything, or be anywhere, at any time? I could stop going to work. I’d get fired. I’d walk a block or two and be able to find work instantly. I could not go to class, I could fail, whatever, it won’t change my life, I can retake classes. I can meet interesting people, sleep with them (using protection, of course), never learn their first or last names, and never see them again. I could sleep til noon on my days off if I wanted to, without letting anyone down or neglecting anything. There’s no one to be disappointed if I fail, but there’s no one who’s super happy when I succeed.
So, for now, it’s perfect. I make enough money to live pretty comfortably for a student. I have vapid, shallow, amusing friends, and empty, goodlooking lovers. There’s a couple awesome people in my life who I do take the time to pay attention to and appreciate, but with most of the people I know, we’re just passing through each others lives. And it’s fun, if hollow.
I design systems that remove sediment and oil from the rainwater that runs off of streets and parking lots. Sometimes I help people install the systems. I write a lot of reports documenting the performance of those systems, and I work on ways to make the systems better.
Occasionally, I have to design a “magic” system because the salesman promised a client that he could make rocks float and water run up hill. Since I’m not a magician, my job in those cases is to convince the client that he doesn’t really want floating rocks or anti-gravity water.
I scare doctors, dentists, and hospital administrators by telling them about the horrible things that will happen to their finances and reputations if they’re sued for malpractice. Then I tell them they should buy insurance from my company to protect them if that happens. Then I go home and smash my head against the wall until I’m numb so I can face another day at work.
Yup, I’m still looking for a new job that doesn’t make me feel like a whore.
Now you went and made me want floating rocks and anti-gravity water!
“Do? I don’t DO anything. That’s the beauty of me.”
Currently I wait for a very sick man to get better so he can give me work to do. When I’m not doing that I indulge my inner child by playing with cute lil kids and playing tough with older ones.
I give the newspaper to homeless guys. Mostly in return I get grunts and bad smells. Sometimes, rarely, I get a “thank you”. Otherwise I do my best to get information to the people; the rich, the poor, the disenfranchised, the educated, the young, the old, whatever. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people scream at you. You get used to it.
Want to hear the height of irony? I feel the same way you do. I dread even calling to order a pizza. I absolutely HATE talking on the phone.
Unfortunately, I have no control over the specific sound of the tone. However, if you ever pick up your phone and get some cheesy 80s New Wave as your dial tone you’ll know who figured out how to change it
I give workshops for the newcomers in gardening in the desert…I hike in the mountains several times a week…I plot and cook damn good chili…I collect unusual and usual watches.
I take care of my family, sing in the shower on occasion, landscape like we will never get rain again, take out the garbage, use the shower frequently enough, write to my brother when my heart calls, smell orange blossoms and eat marmelade, on rare occasions wash my truck, work at my hobby job enough to support my hobbies, miss my wife when she is gone, and enjoy the quiet when she is…
Always have a plan of what needs to be done, and never finish the list…but lots seems to get done anyway. Exercise like there’s no tomorrow, 'cause I learned there might not be.
Spend too much time and other resources on my interests…sometimes wonder if being really focuse is good or bad. It can lead to great things, or leave you continually twirling in a whirlpool of self.
Get lost in photography and then changing the so vey real and unimaginative camera captures into the things that I really saw…and what does that say about how we see the world?..
Expect that I’m really just like you…
Enjoy life, and hold it dear.
Or did I miss the question?
I make 50 phone calls a day, telling company commanders what to do, how many people they need to send somewhere to do work…then I call my higher headquarters and yell at them when they send my battalion taskings that are rediculously stupid, argue with them, and try and get something that actually makes sense. I also sit in meetings, take notes and type tasking orders for the companies in the battalion. I spend the majority of my day sitting in front of the computer, typing orders, answering e-mails about those orders, while on the phone at the same time. It’s busy!
(I’m the battalion operations officer for an Army unit in Germany)
Australia uses a 1920s Style Death Ray to defend its borders, interesting…
As for myself, I work in a university helping students from outside the UK. Most of the time I help deal with the masses of paperwork generated by the EU’s student exchange scheme so that European students can study for a while here in Northern Ireland and vice versa. Paper comes in to tell us who they are and where they’re from and it all needs stamping and filing.
Then I spend some time getting the Home Office to grant visa extensions without messing around most of the time (they’re getting worse the more they charge for this service :rolleyes: )
The rest of the time at work I spend on here and other websites 
That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me going. Thanks.
My first answer was a bit flip, although accurate. Since other people after me have described their jobs, I’ll describe mine.
I record people speaking, including myself, and edit them (and me) to sound a level of eloquent and well-spoken that we will never achieve in real time. I produce their sessions, and coax better performances out of them than they would have got by doing it themselves, then edit all the good bits together. I assemble radio programs, and often play digitally with the properties of space and time to make them come out to an exact number of minutes and seconds. I go behind other people who have told the computer what to play on the radio at any time of the day, and try to catch their mistakes so it plays the right thing, as opposed to what they told it to play. Sometimes I miss something, and that’s bad for the station, because almost all of our mistakes are public.
I create promos for upcoming programs, or take existing ones made weekly and paste the voice of one of our announcers on the end giving the day and time, and load them onto the automation system for playback. I operate the control room for the afternoon drive news program, which is a mix of network and locally originating content. I re-edit and add production values to news pieces made locally and by other stations, that go on our flagship news program weekly. I’m the guy they come to when they have an idea of what they want their piece to sound like, but don’t know how to achieve it in the digital editor.
Mainly, I get to play with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cool equipment every day, and I get to hear my voice coming out of the radio all the time. I try to maintain a standard that makes everything we do on the station sound professional.
If I ever get bored at work, I can go play a near-hundred-year-old Steinway concert grand piano! That’s one of the perqs of working there.
These last two weeks I got to make spiderwebs and snow. The kind you see at Halloween and Christmas. My job wasn’t to make spiderwebs and snow. My job was to put white plastic parts in a turret lathe, blow an air hose on them and make sure they got shaved down to the right size. The spiderwebs and snow were the byproduct of this process but were much more fun. Especially the spiderwebs. I could make them sail 10-20 feet or more with the air hose but most made this huge cobweb on the lathe and up the side of its computer terminal. My co-workers liked my cobwebs. The boss, not so much.
Alas, that project is over. Next week I’m back to putting a thousand cylindrical metal parts into the side of a machine one by one, where not long after, they come out the other side several thousandths of a centimeter thinner than before. When all thousand parts are on the other side of the machine I will gather them up, and after an adjustment to the machine, I will put them back into the side of the machine one by one, where they will come out the other side several thousandths of a centimeter even thinner. This process may be repeated a few more times until they are just the right size. It’s not as fun as spiderwebs and snow but there’s a whole heck of a lot worse things to do for a paycheck. Besides, in warmer weather when the bay door is open, I’m practically sitting outside. Hurry up, summer!
The spiderweb parts will be going into boats. The metal cylindrical parts will be going into exercise bikes. Next time you find yourself riding either, think of me. I’m a machinist’s assistant.
But you don’t really want them, do you?
Think of the kick-ass fountian you could install in your ceiling!