I do a bunch of IT stuff, and a big misconception is that it’s actually hard. Most of it is easy. Let me turn this following quote into an analogy:
If you take the trouble to learn a little bit about this tool you’ve been using for the last 25+ years for most aspects of your job and life, then you wouldn’t be having these problems.
Yes, yes, some if it is hard, and that is often the fun parts, but lots of it is damn easy. Particularly
and all I did was read the message on the screen and follow the directions right there to fix the problem.
Anyway, I guess this misconception keeps me employed.
I was a Federal employee for 37 years, and my own father used to make cracks like that. Ha ha so funnee…
Yeah, we had the guy who would nap in his car on the clock, but we had more folks who came in early and stayed late or worked weekends to meet deadlines. I did my share of night shifts, and often ate my lunch while working.
Of course, the bureaucracy often didn’t foster efficiency but rules is rules if the boss is an ass. And I saw similar idiocy in some non-govvy jobs.
My hobby is knitting. It’s not really difficult to tell the difference between knitting and crocheting. (hint: knitting takes 2 tools; crocheting takes one.) Yet, everyone gets it wrong, even in movies and commercials and so forth. Always.
I paint in oils. A few years back, before I retired from my job, I showed some of my co-workers a few photos of a series of portraits I had done over the past decade, each of which took many, many hours to complete, plus a whole lot of effort on my part.
A few weeks afterwards, one of the secretaries in my office (who incidentally turned her job title into “office manager”–by which I mean, she just decided one day that her title was no longer “secretary” and had a placard made up with her new title on it) plopped a few photos on my desk and asked me if I could make a portrait of her out of them. I tried pointing out that yes I could, but it would be a long, involved process that I didn’t have the time for now, and all she said was “Okay, I’ll wait.”
Every month or so afterward she would inquire how the portrait was coming along and I would answer “I haven’t started yet–I’m busier than ever.” When she retired, she reminded me that I never got around to painting it, and I said, “I never said I would get around to it” and she walked off in a huff, saying “I thought we were friends. Guess I was wrong.”
I think a lot of people who aren’t “computer people”, are afraid of clicking on anything if they aren’t 100% sure what it does, lest they “break” something. What these people don’t understand is that when I “fix” their computer, there may be trial and error involved; I don’t magically know what every menu option does either.
Once, soon after I had been made a sysadmin at a previous job, the manager of the Customer Service Dept. came to me in a badly disguised state of panic saying he had some really important Excel files on his computer that just disappeared on him. He wanted to know if I could do some sort of a hard drive memory recovery and get them back.
So I said, well, let’s see what the problem is…
It turned out he had no idea where the files were actually stored on his computer-- he had been accessing them exclusively through the “recent files” choice within the Excel menu, and some more recent files had pushed the ones he was looking for out of the top 5 or whatever. He was so relieved that I was able to “recover” them (by looking in his “Documents” folder) .
When my daughter was applying to study Information Studies (AKA library science) at grad school, one of the stories she told in her essay was about when she came to me with a computer problem and the first thing I did was google the error message. The relevance to information studies was that experts don’t know everything but they do know how to find out and that’s what a reference librarian does.
“I have a great idea for your next novel!” I’m happy for you. Ideas are as common as dust. Talent isn’t.
“Would you edit this rough draft I’ve had sitting around for ten years for free?” Only if I love you very very much. Which I don’t.
Riding (horses): “Oh wow! So we can go horse riding!” Um, I don’t put ignorant people on my horse. I don’t know anyone else who does either unless you are paying them quite a bit. Horses are not machines.
Pro tip: don’t say “horse riding”. It flags you as ignorant. It’s “riding” or “horseback riding” but never “horse riding”. In fact the sport has specific language dating back to the birth of modern English (not to mention Spanish, if you ride Western).
I’m a math instructor at the local community college. Not exactly a misconception, but… most people who learn this about me immediately proceed to tell me how much they suck at math. Or all about how their kid/grandkid/nephew/niece/whatever is failing their math class. Now, I will grant that there are some people out there who are fundamentally unable to understand math. But my belief is that in most cases, when a person says “I suck at math,” the actual issue is that they don’t like math, and do their best to avoid math, and have convinced themselves that they are unable to learn math.
Related to this, I can’t begin to count the number of students who pull me aside and confide in me that they just can’t do word problems, because they are utterly unable to figure out what is going on, it’s like a foreign language, yadda yadda yadda. There are two responses I would love to give to this, but I never will…
1) “You know who else feels that way? EVERY OTHER STUDENT IN THE CLASSROOM.”
2) “The real issue here is that you don’t want to have to actually think about the word problem. You just want to be fed a formula, so you can plug in some numbers and be done with it.”
But, I wouldn’t be a very good teacher if I told these truths, now would I? So instead I say something reassuring, about how it won’t be that bad, and so on.
When I first studied aeronautics pleople would ask me if I wanted to become an astronaut. I gave up aeronautics in the end.
I am tall and have been asked all my life whether I play basketball. No, I don’t. I may be tall, but I am not good at throwing or aiming, running makes me tired (and is for cowards, as Charlie Rexach used to say) and the ball makes your hands dirty. No, I don’t play basket. Never wanted to. Never will.
Pleople always confuse translators and interpreters. And then they challenge us to say off the cuff and out of context what that or that other word means and how it is said in another language. That is not how it works. And our clients of all people should know by now that we are not called interpretators.
I think you would. It is sad that you feel you should tell students the untruth because it is politer than banging their heads against the wall, as they deserve.
Minor complaint about my husband, sometimes I ask him how to do something technical and he’ll act like he knows, and then I just watch him go through the menus on my app or whatever trying to figure it out… Which I can do for myself, thanks.
I work in nonprofit development, which is the fundraising and admin side of nonprofit management. People for some reason do not consider me a social worker. I’ve got a Master’s degree in social work with a macro concentration, I’m a freaking social worker. When I was grants coordinator for a community development corporation some punk Americorps kid legit asked me, “Why did you decide to leave social work?” I’M WORKING AT THE SAME NONPROFIT, dingus.
Social work can entail direct services like therapy or casework, but also community organizing, community development, policy advocacy, policy writing, social research, philanthropy, nonprofit development and administration - all that macro stuff.
On the flip side, people associate social work with less pay (true) and by association less education and skill (not necessarily true.) Social work jobs often entail a wide range of professional skills and expertise, but of course this is an issue that plagues any gendered profession. Women’s work can’t actually be all that hard, can it?
Bonus points for people complaining about how much nonprofit CEOs make (their job is to know rich people and solicit donations from their network) or people complaining that nonprofits pay their employees any salary at all, or people complaining about nonprofits spending money on marketing, it’s like they really don’t understand that this is a business that requires business skills to operate. My job is to help make sure our 39 employees go home with a paycheck and can continue providing community services to 30,000 people a year without interruption. It’s high pressure, complex work that’s worth more than I’m getting paid, it is skilled work and it is social work.
I had to redo my last year of high school because of math but not because “I suck at math” but because, at that time (40 yrs ago) we had to memorize all formulae and equations, which was my damn downfall. Otherwise I really like maths and sciences, in a theoretical and superficial way.
Not really a ‘hobby’ per se, but a common misconception that sometimes annoys me is when folks with a garden variety headache ramble on about ‘oh, I’ve got a terrible migraine, it’s killing me’ and then proceed to continue working, eating, or engaging in some physical activity, etc. as if the headache was some sort of mere inconvenience one can easily muscle through the pain on.
Migraines are not just really bad headaches. They’re a specific type of headache usually with other types of symptoms (e.g. extreme light sensitivity and/or nausea). Not a term to be used interchangeably anytime someone wants to just say they have a headache.
Yes, this is where knowing your user is important. Unless I genuinely know the answer, I’ll tell my wife that I do not know the answer, because she can probably figure it out through the same steps I’d use. My tech skill is higher than hers, so if she can’t figure it out, then I might have to make a roll with my bonus, but by that point we’re usually off into truly difficult issues.
Similar on the Slack at work. Often if somebody asks a tech question and I’d have to research the answer, I’ll refrain from replying because they can also research the answer themselves. (Other times I will research and reply, it depends on who asks and the circumstances.)
Where IT stops being easy is when I can understand the answer, but it is not understood by other people with less experience, even though they can find the answer.
I get annoyed by people who complain that non-profits should be working on some other problem. “If there are any starving children anywhere in the world, then that is the only problem that anybody should be working to fix.”
s/math/technology/g and that is about half of my job. I totally understand the concept of “I don’t feel like doing this thing that I find annoying, and I’m happy to pay somebody to do it for me,” but people, be honest with yourselves.
Oh, your husband is a physician? Well, you can afford <…> then!
~Well actually, no we can’t. Yes he makes a good salary, but it’s not remotely in the million dollar house + lake house + Range Rover + top-of-the-line-everything class. He’s a non-surgical family doc who’s spent most of his years in teaching programs, and we’re still paying his school loans (siiiigh).
Horses, riding, and training:
I know a lot about dressage, eventing, certain aspects of jumping. I know a tiny, minuscule bit about western disciplines, Hunter/Jumper judging, driving, endurance, saddle seat, gaited horses. No, I don’t know such and such trainer who lives across the country and “does English”. No, I don’t know why your horse tosses her head/won’t stop/won’t go/does some weird thing. After 60 years of horse ownership and 40+ of teaching and training, I can make a darned good guess (the equine version of PEBCAK) but I’m not diagnosing OR treating from just your description. I don’t know you, don’t know your horse, have never seen you ride.
The above gets a tad trickier because I work in a tack shop. I’m amazed at the number of people who come in and ask “What’s a good bit for my horse?” with zero other info provided. That’s like asking your doctor “what medicine should I take?” or going to the electrical contractor’s outlet asking “What gauge wire should I buy?”
Animals in general:
I have a lot of animals, and have done fostering when I could. Currently it’s not feasible for a number of reasons. Cue people who barely know anything about me other than I love and have animals telling me I MUST take in this poor sweet abandoned dog/feral cat/ancient horse because they’d do so well with me! No, sorry. Just because I might have room for another animal doesn’t mean I want the responsibility that goes with a very old horse, or an untrained horse, or a traumatized dog, or a newly neutered adult tomcat. I have a stable, contented herd at home and I owe them peace and happiness first. If/when I can take on more I will, but not at the expense of my old friends.
