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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
“I’m a stand-up comic.”
“Ooh! Heckle me!”
“I don’t know anything about you and don’t wanna say anything mean about you. Just enjoy the moment without getting a performer to do free work for you.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Don’t have to be on all the time, let me eat my burger.”
I imagine you get these questions all the time, but how did you get into stand-up, and how did you get the guts to get up on a stage and try to be funny?
I love the idea of stand-up comedy, but I've been to a few open mic nights and it almost always seems like drunk people showing off, people that are hilariously unfunny, or people in the crowd that try to shit on anyone remotely trying to entertain.
I started out as a quizmaster, telling quiz for a night a week. I’d open my show with a new 45-second bit each week, built audience numbers over time.
Then I realized I’d been doing this for years, and was an incredibly prolific comic! I had enough material I could just walk out onto a stage and just lengthen out my opening bits, cause I no longer had a quiz to tell that night!
Explaining my job is trivial compared to the insanity I cook up in my spare time.
Oh, so you like gaming? No, I'm actually not playing the game. I'm building a mod for it. Erm, okay, so this is for other players then? No, I'm mostly building it for myself. Ah, so you haven't put a lot of time into it yet? Roughly 12 years. What? So what does the mod do then? It plays the game for me, and publishes in-game metrics to a monitoring application, so that I can see the progress of the game in an abstract form while I'm on the couch, thinking about how to optimize the automation further.
Regular fun stuff.
factorio?
Kittensgame
Yes. I'm a near surface geophysicist. So I don't look for oil or minerals but I do try to figure out what's going on underground without digging. Mostly looking for mine or karst voids under new construction.
Depends on wether I want them to understand. If I just say we are the ISP for universities and other schools of higher education then they mostly go, "Ah okay", but it seems like no one has any idea what that means. I feel like despite using them daily people don't even know what a network is sometimes.
Yeah but developed a quick explanation for it: Industrial water treatment tech for HVAC. You know how having a swimming pool or hot tub requires some chemistry? I do that for water in boilers and cooling towers used to heat or cool big buildings
Yes, I do. I'm a devops engineer and even "coding camp devs" have problems understanding what I do for a living.
I think most devs even only have worked in software companies that sell software where devops isn't as critical and complex since there's not "production" environments. When you work for a company who makes software for themselves and/or hosts software from other companies themselves, devops is a much bigger deal. Even moreso if it's a heavily regulated industry like healthcare. Most other companies don't spend much on devops or even often make the developers do that work themselves.
Game Dev here. More specifically, audio director. Used to be tech sound designer and composer. I find it hard to explain even over here, among the geeks like me.
My job title is an acronym, inside the company no one seems to agree on what this acronym stands for. So yes, I just say I work in the Automotive industry.
I'm a public servant, so while it's easy to tell people I work for The Government, it's a lot harder to explain what I do. My job is a mish-mash of like three different roles in one of the least popular departments. When people ask, I say I work for (our version of) the DMV, and that's usually good enough.
I'm working on making robots do useful things. I think that's fairly easy for most people to understand.
yes
Yeah, I work in cyber forensics where everything I do is confidential, so yeah, I can't actually explain my job which makes it difficult to explain my job
I don't have trouble explaining. I keep it high level and generic because 99 times out of 100, people are just making small talk and want to know just enough about you to categorize you.
Similar with trying to explain the Fediverse. It doesn't come up often, but the explanation is sometimes just
Non-profit run social media
While not entirely accurate since you can run an instance for profit, it's been the case for pretty much every instance and it's definitely true for the side I'm helping with
Describing my job? Yeah, sure. I do science.
Explaining my job? Hell no. Nobody is willing to read a 20 page lit review to start to understand the background of what I do
Contramuffin. (2024). Describing my job: I do science. Lemmy World, 78(9), 69-420.
Reading the first several posts... Is everyone here in IT? 🤣🤣
No, but only because we subdivide what layman think of as IT into many specialties
Mostly, yeah
I recently told a seven year old that I am a wizard. I already have the beard and being a programmer, that is exactly what my customers feel about my work.
Me: I'm in IT (trying to keep it simple)
Them: OK, but what do you do in IT?
Me: I'm a system administrator (again trying to keep it simple)
Them: I don't know what that means. What does a system administrator do?
Me: I work on servers (again, trying to keep it simple)
Them: What's a server?
Me: I'm in IT...
Trouble as in I'm in trouble if I do. I'm a formally educated it security engineer running my own incorporated software and infrastructure company. Firstly: people just hear "computer guy" and their second thought is "he can fix my stuff". So I stay near to the truth and simplify it: I'm a theoretical electrical engineer. Boom, instant bored face and they leave as fast as they can. My neighbors love me, but I haven't fixed a single of their computers in decades.
Also pro tip: the wife has the same qualifications as I, so she fixes her family's stuff herself. My job is to lug stuff and the kids around at home.
simplify it: I'm a theoretical electrical engineer.
So, IT is just theoretical electricity.
I need to remember that 😁
Nope. I keep the internet working.
People seem happy when I say that. Unless my internet at home craps out and my wife makes a cheeky joke about it.
Yep.
Network engineer here. I can't count the number of times my mom says I'm in programming.
After a few years, my wife figured out the best way to describe my job. Doctor of the internet. This was because I was working in operations at the time and would fix network outages regularly.
Did you put an SR to get thru her (mom's) firewall first?
Information Security is so hard to explain to old people who don’t know much about technology. My grandparents back then (late 2000s) never understood it no matter how I explained it, and they thought I was a security guard at the bank I worked at. You could also see the disappointment in their faces thinking how someone who took IT in college ended up as a security guard.
I cast spells that make the runes etched in sand translate the energy of magic stones into dancing light.
Usually I just tell people that I work in IT and leave it at that.
"Hey so does that mean you can fix my laptop and make my next gen app idea for free?"
Of course!
