In the episode where they play the game of betting their apartments, the girls don’t know that he’s a “Processor”. At one point earlier in the series, before he realizes he wants to do marketing, they offer him quite a lucrative salary plus a big office to get him to stay.
What the heck is processing, and why would Chandler be worth so much money? Also, what is a WENUS?
Is it supposed to be a joke that Chandler’s job is just a paper pushing gig that he took until he could find something better (and didn’t until twenty years later) like Barney’s on How I Met Your Mother?
That’s kind of an ongoing problem with sitcom writing – the writers have never held a real job and don’t know how to describe jobs in the real world.
But Chandler’s job seemed a bit like mine: crunching numbers retrieved through IT. (He never showed any actual IT prowess, though.) So he’s a Systems Analyst, sort of.
Yes, the premise (at the beginning) was that Chandler had pretty much only worked in lousy temp jobs and had pretty much drifted into data processing. At some point, his boss offered him a humongous amount of money (“Does that include dental???”) to become a manager, which he did until he flamed out and went into advertising.
I seem to remember Chandler being the only one who was ever shown having a computer. He had some sort of dinky laptop with a crazy small screen… it was used to generate Ross’s Rachel vs Julie - Pro / Con list.
“All right, check out this bad boy. 12 megabytes of ram. 500 megabyte hard drive. Built-in spreadsheet capabilities and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 b.p.s.”