I’m a Math PhD student.
“I always hated Math.” (Thanks. I hate your profession, too, asshole.)
“I was never good at Math.” (Are you proud of this?)
“You must be very smart.” (No, I just study something you are unfamiliar with.)
“You can do research in … Math?” (Um, yes.)
I’m finishing my thesis this semester.
“How many chapters do you have done?” (WTF? Chapters?)
I’m a statistician.
Are you serious?
I must not look like one…
…or my ceiling! Stupid spatula.
I work in the elections industry.
My favorite: “So who’s going to win the next election?” wink “ha ha ha”
or not nearly as much anymore.
“So you caused all those problems in Florida”
Um, not my company’s equipment, but thanks for playing.
This reminds me of a great quote from my multivariable calculus professor.
Ooh, I know - you make something for pee sticks!
We sure have a lot of high-falutin’ occupations here.
When I was studying Geology, I got a lot of:
“You dig up dinosaurs?”
That would be a poor use of class time that could be spent learning about the parts of Geology that don’t get into movies.
“So you want to dig up dinosaurs?”
I really like them, but there’s not much of career in it.
“You want to work in a museum? That’s so boring.”
See dinosaur comments. Please stop going to museums and annoying the people who do like them.
Occasionally, I’d get:
“So, you want to explore ruins like Indiana Jones?”
Again, sounds like fun, but he was an Archeologist. Different root word and all.
Once in a great while I got:
“So, you want to live with, like, a tribe and wear a gourd on your wang?”
That does not sound like quite as much fun. It also sounds like an Anthropologist. I think. Also, see root word thing.
When we were away at field camp (final 2 month outdoor lecture/practical exam/50 person drunken camping trip through the US Southwest) we were constantly asked:
“Found much gold/diamonds/oil/dinosaurs?”
Yup. So much, in fact, that we stopped collecting them. We ran out of room in the invisible tractor-trailer. Now I totally understand why you can’t buy that stuff at Wal-Mart, there’s no way they can make money on things that any idiot can get for free just by walking around.
And
“So, you’re on a dig?”
Considering that we have no shovels or dental picks, that we are not crowded into a shallow, gridded-off hole and that digging up pot shards and dead people would be a really dumb way to get your last six Geology credits; why yes, we must be on a dig.
Now that I work for an energy company I hear a lot of:
“So, you read the meters on houses?”
No, that’s a power company. We find the natural gas and sell it to pipeline companies, who sell it to the utilities."
Then I usually get Oredigger77’s questions, with the same answers.
“You must get to fill up your car really cheap, then.”
No, the stuff in cars is gasoline. And why would I get a discount at the Shell station?
But the best ones are when I tell people I used to deliver pizza:
"Did you make a lot of, you know, special deliveries? Wink wink, nudge nudge. smoking gestures and sound effects
Dude, I didn’t just deliver it, I grew it in the trunk of my car. Doesn’t everybody call complete strangers at a fast food franchise when they need some dope?
“Did you make a lot of, you know, special deliveries? Wink wink, nudge nudge. salacious leer”
All the time. You would not believe the number of smokin’ hot lonely housewives/sorority sisters/bored rich girls who place phony orders in the hope that a random sweaty, grease and cheese encrusted, cash-strapped college kid will step out of his shuddering, blue smoke spewing deathtrap with wheels and step into her naughtiest fantasies. There’s even a code. Extra cheese? No problem. Canadian bacon and pineaple? You wild thing, you. Extra pepperoni? Sorry, I don’t swing that way.
Either we’re all incredibly clever or we all talk to some really really stupid people. Probably the truth is somewhere in between the two.
I used to tell people I was a policy advisor but after getting so many 
faces I switched to saying I work at the Department for Education and Skills/Children Schools and Families (Dept name changed last year). The number of people who ask me if my job involves working with children boggles my mind, not because it’s necessarily a huge jump of logic (especially now with the children schools and families name) but it suggests a fundamental and wide-spread lack of understanding in the population as to how central government functions and what it involves.
The worst one was when I described my current position to someone in a fair amount of detail for her to then say at the end of it “So you’re like a social worker?” I think that says more about her than people in general though.
The least fun I had was when someone asked me what I did and I was (at the time) working for the Minister for Schools as one of his private secretaries - she was a teacher. Never have I been made to feel so personally responsible for someone else’s problems in all my life.
“Parimutuel tote Wagering Hub Manager”
“Oh, what do you do?”
<sigh>
edit: I guess it’s stupid of people to ask what I do, because I might actually tell them. And then they would be a tiny little bit stupider afterwards.
L’esprit d’escalier, my friend, l’esprit d’escalier.
tout à fait
I’m in philosophy. People’s responses usually involve:
(1) thinking I want to hear about their experiences in philosophy.
(2) mistaking literature/psychology or whatever for philosophy.
“Oh, I did a course on James Joyce’s view of Ireland and Freud. What do you think about that?”
I think you should sod off.
A friend of mine (very pretentiously) tells people he’s a mathematician. Partly because we ency ‘real’ academic disciplines, and partly because people shut up, he says.
put down the sabre
nevah mind /Emily Litella
I index books.
“Oh, wow…I thought that was all done by computer.”
It’s okay, though, because I used to think the same thing myself.
I’m a linguist. A sociophonetician to be exact, but I don’t use that term, usually.
When I say linguist, I either get a blank stare or asked how many languages I speak (my response: either “I barely speak English!” or “All of them”) or “I better watch my grammar!” (no, you twit, if everyone spoke standard English, I’d be out of a job). No one has yet to make a “cunning linguist” joke to me yet, but I hope someone does so I can answer, leeringly, “I minor in fellatio.” Or they think I’m a speech therapist.
Sometimes I say I study dialects of English. Again, the blank stare, or, my favorite, “Guess where I’m from!” I mean, I wish I was good enough to do that, but I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of every dialect of English. Yet.
Occasionally, I tell someone in linguistics that I do socio, and they tell me I’m not a real linguist. Sigh
I’m a Public Defender. Invariably, when people find that out, they say something along the lines of “Wow, how can you defend people who you know are guilty?”
Apparently, constitutional protections are only for the Good Guys.
One of my best friends is a linguist. He gets the “cunning linguist” thing all the time. He’s gay, and the joke is still not funny.
As an actuary, the usual response is simply “what’s that?”
I’m a building contractor, and a roof inspector. I typically work with homeowners and insurance companies after storms, natural disasters, or fires.
In my quirky moments, I call myself a ‘stormchaser.’ But even if call myself a contractor, there is still mass confusion because I am female.
Oh, so you work for a contractor?
Oh, you are the office help?
You get up on roofs?
A lot of times I just avoid the conversation.
Here’s a great site for your kid. Has tons of different information about weather all over the US. Should take him years to process all of it.
You never get “so tell me how long do I have to live, ha ha ha?”
Well, it’s not like I had to toss people out every night or anything, but it was common enough that I wouldn’t find it remarkable. I’m not sure a cop could say the same about shooting at someone.
Of course, asking problem customers to leave would be the first step, and most do so relatively peacefully. But not always, and the worst offenders were guys who got cut off, as if yelling in my face and threatening violence would get me to serve them more booze.
The bars were both in Scotland (Glasgow specifically). One was in a not-great part of town, the other downtown. Neither would be considered to be a particularly rough pub by locals.
