Explain Your Job, Poorly

[Paul der Krake]

I rearrange my lights on my boxes until around 5pm.

Then I go home.

When I come back at 9am the next day, the lights have changed.

The amount of changing that occurred overnight dictates how long I spend in the office kitchen before starting the rearrangement again.

Sometimes they hardly change. Those days, I go to other websites where I read about other people's strange patterns and what they have done about it.

[driftwood]

I have the privilege of telling people to continue to keep doing the job they're already doing. If they stopped I wouldn't have the experience or training to do their job, I'm just the one that tells them they should do it. 

Many times my bosses want to know if these people are doing their job and when it will be done.  The answer is always yes, they are doing their job and when it is done it will be done.

When I take vacation or get sent away from my job for training or other jobs, somehow everything that needs to be done continues to be done. 

Sometimes I get to give these folks fancy sheets of paper or shiny metal thingies they can wear on a work uniform that they seldom ever wear, all in an attempt to keep them excited and motivated to keep doing what they're already doing well.

[Butterfingers]

I take words other people have written, arrange them into a slightly more pleasing configuration, put them in pretty packaging, and then sell the result to different other people.

[Playing with Fire UK]

I use numbers to guess at what would happen if other things happen in the right order ( this would be a bad thing, so maybe it is if things happen in the wrong order, but a special wrong order). This is my order of things.

One day a order of things will happen. I will need to explain what the numbers mean. If they are very different I will need to explain why the order of things that happened are slightly different to my order of things. If I do this and it is not good I will stop being paid to use numbers on orders of things. Also some people will lose some money and other people will have money they should not have.

The order of things might happen a long time after I am dead, in which case other people will look at my order of things.

H/T to https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-checker

[Linea_Norway]

I take words other people have written, arrange them into a slightly more pleasing configuration, put them in pretty packaging, and then sell the result to different other people.

Hé, sounds like your are doing my job!

I look at a text another person has written. I open an old word document, give it a new name, remove the existing text and add the text that other person wrote into it and change it a bit if necessary. After peer review of this new Word document, I hand it over to the customer and we read it together and I explain what it means. Even if the customer is the one who reported the issue in the first place.

[Linea_Norway]

After 2 years of being new and asking thousands of questions to my more experienced colleagues, I am now answering those same thousands of questions to a new inexperienced person.

[Aelias]

I tell people what the rules are and how they should follow the rules. When they say, "But I don't want to follow the rules," I tell them how screwed they will be if they don't follow the rules. Remind them that they really should follow the rules. And sometimes they do. But not always.

[ncornilsen]

My job is to talk to other people who do tangible work, to find out how they do their job, so I can make their job easier or eliminate their job. I then make convincing arrangements of dots on a screen to convince others to let me keep my job.

[sol]

I convert the analog universe into a smaller and more manageable digital one.

I seem to remember ice caves and penquin poop were involved with your job ;-)

Once upon a time, sure.  That's the "measuring the analog" part that comes before the digital part.  You have to make sure your digital universe is a good approximation, right?  It wouldn't make any sense to just make up a random digital universe.

[Samuel]

Half the time I make sure things are where people expect them to be. The other half the time I pretend like I’m making sure things are where people expect them to be.

[teen persuasion]

My current work days revolve around marked slices of wood that cause people to hallucinate vividly for hours.  I move the marked slices around from place to place, try to convince outsiders to take them away, harangue people to bring them back, buy more, get rid of them when we have too many, swap bags full with organizations miles away.  At every stage of moving these slices, I must wave them each under a lighted plastic wand to make a "beep".

I am slowly being phased out of my position as teen persuasion specialist.

[Luke Warm]

i try to convince people that say 'no' for a living to say 'yes'.

[PhysicsCat]

I set things on fire to find out whats inside them.

[Smokystache]

I project words on a screen and then read the words to people (who can already read) so we can charge them thousands of dollars for something they could have got for a buck-fifty in late charges at the library.

[deadlymonkey]

I solve problems that people don't know they have by doing things that would be illegal for most people to do.

[cschx]

I work for a very large, very rich organization that pays really smart people large amounts of money to think up complicated new ideas.

These really smart people spend most of their time thinking and writing down their ideas, helping other smart people to refine and improve their own ideas, and curating collections of related ideas. Then they give away their finished, highly polished ideas – for free – to companies who lock them up and charge other people lots of money to read about them.

My job is to take huge amounts of money from my organization and give it away to these companies, so they can sell us back the ideas that the really smart people (who also work for my organization) were originally paid to produce.

[AZDude]

People ask me to look at their job and decide if I can do it better. I write shit into a computer that makes their job obsolete. They then pay me for this privilege.

[aperture]

Doctors ask me why the pills their patient may be taking are not making that patient happy.  Unless I find evidence that the patient never took the pills, I often conclude that the patient is drinking (smoking) too much, or is living with very bad instructions they learned from their parents.  No matter what, I have to suggest new pills to try, because that is what everyone really wants.  -aperture

[Just Joe]

I remind my more educated and sometimes more experienced coworkers how to use the tools provided to them by our employer. When they break these tools b/c they insisted on trial and error approaches, I repair these tools and then instruct my coworkers how to use them again. I don't understand how a person can use a tool for 20+ years and not know everything about it.

I also do a fair amount of moving of work place equipment as our leaders decide that if we rearrange everything, we will be able to work more efficiently. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes it makes no difference. I find that if I wait a few days, sometimes they change their mind and create a new plan or decide to make no changes at all. No point in getting right to work or I'll have to double the work. I don't like to change things back to the way they were before. 

[jinga nation]

I take it in the mouth and up the butt in an effort to provide happy endings. I get paid decently well for it.

[sol]

I take it in the mouth and up the butt in an effort to provide happy endings. I get paid decently well for it.

You would not be the first (or second or third) sex worker to frequent the forums.

[Orvell]

I babysit 1-5 adults who are Important People in an office setting, while making sure the ever-churning crush of paperwork they generate stays in motion. People come up to me and ask me questions. People call me and ask me questions. I smile.

[SuperMex]

I sit in a 10 x 12 room and stare at a box with lights. People send me strings in this box and I respond to these strings by sending other strings back.

People who have been doing their job for 30 years knock on my door and ask me for advise on how to do their job even though I have never done their job. I learned all of the responses I give them by spending a long weekend reading a 400 page manual on this job. To my shock only a few people in the entire country who work in this job have ever read or tried to understand what is in this manual which contains almost all of the rules of this job.

I regurgitate information from this manual and people are very impressed by my knowledge. Occasionally people question what I tell them so I look it up in the manual and show it to them.

Other people come into my office and ask me for things they no they aren't allowed to have. When I tell them no they become very angry and make all kinds of irrational arguments about why they should get things they know they aren't allowed to have.

When I get bored of doing this and want to make a little bit of extra money I look into my box and find a class on the other side of the world about something I already know or could learn in an hour on my own. I then turn in a form which has always been approved. I then fly across the world, stay in 4-5 star hotels, eat fancy meals and attend a class on something I already know for 1-2 weeks.

[MichaelB]

I talk to the voices in my head(set) about money. Then I push buttons and change blinking lights on the glow-squares to do what the voices tell me.

[BDWW]

I destroy the corpses of hard dead plants to make shapes humans find useful.

[Kitsunegari]

I take it in the mouth and up the butt in an effort to provide happy endings. I get paid decently well for it.

You would not be the first (or second or third) sex worker to frequent the forums.

Afaik sex workers have a huge earning potential when young but usually short careers, so this forum would be a very good place for them.

[Kris]

I write books about the same thing, over and over again, and try to make it sound different every time.

[Al1961]

I told the public that government was fiscally and/or operationally responsible. Sometimes I got to make politicians and bureaucrats make fiscally/operationally sound decisions under threat of making their incompetence public. Sometimes I got to follow through on the threat. (We used softer terms in public.)

It was even a legislated mandate!

[solon]

Some people have problems, so they pay other people to make software that helps them with those problems. I tell those other people how big the software they wrote is.

[CopperTex]

I shoot babies.

[sol]

I shoot babies.

That is a terrible job description.

[Kris]

I shoot babies.

That is a terrible job description.

The description, and your comment, literally made me snort liquid out of my nose.

[SuperMex]

He must be a pediatric immunologist....

[erutio]

Oh man, these are great.  I think I can figure some out but others descriptions I have no clue.  We should put spoiler alerts over what we really do.

For me, the government pays me some of your tax-dollars to convince old people to use up more of your tax-dollars.

Spoiler: show

Physician

[erp]

I read well meaning rules which conflict with other well meaning rules, I suggest that the well meaning rules change. The rules do not change. Sometimes I move numbers around so that the same numbers match these rules.

[FIRE Artist]

He must be a pediatric immunologist....

Or a child photographer.

[kms]

I stare at a glowing box and make sure that other boxes, much bigger and louder ones, run a system that was first invented in 1969. I also help improve that system and its successors by pressing funny little individually labeled keys to make things happen on that big loud box.

[Paul der Krake]

I stare at a glowing box and make sure that other boxes, much bigger and louder ones, run a system that was first invented in 1969. I also help improve that system and its successors by pressing funny little individually labeled keys to make things happen on that big loud box.

Found the the COBOL programmer.

[AshStash]

My work is real but in reality it's all theoretical. No one who doesn't do what I do understands what I do, although after they read about what I've done, sometimes they find it helpful.

[Shor]

I'm the guy that tries to tell multi-billion dollar companies that: no, they in fact are not allowed to jellify people with electro-magnetic waves.. Not out of human decency, or common sense, mind you. It's because there's this paper that says they really shouldn't jellify people with electro-magnetic waves...

Sometimes they try to jellify people anyway... they literally don't have to listen to me.

[cheddarpie]

I pull turds out of water.

I help people pay millions of dollars for the privilege of pulling their own turds out of water.

[MonkeyJenga]

I'm a professional hypocrite.

[ketchup]

I shoot babies.

That is a terrible job description.

Pft, that's nothing.  My GF shoots puppies!

[minority_finance_mo]

I like this spoiler idea!

I listen to people's problems and pretend I have the power to fix them, in the hope that they'll return the favor by doing what I ask them to do at some point in the future.

Spoiler: show

Product Manager

[kms]

Found the the COBOL programmer.

Close, not that much COBOL anymore. Mostly Fortran, C, and a lot of shell scripting these days but still, you're good.

[Ladychips]

I spend part of my time telling people they can't keep doing what they are doing.

I spend part of my time trying to tell people how to do their job.

But I spend most of my time trying to get groups of people to do what my boss wants...and if I'm really good at it, those people think it was their idea in the first place.

[Psychstache]

I sit in a room with 3 other people while we talk about what we are going to talk about when we go to the room with 12 other people. Then I go to the room with the 12 people and talk about  the 3 person room conversation. Then me and my 3 people argue with 1-5 of the other people about what we just said. Then, we leave the 12 person room and go back to the 3 person room to work on what we talked about. 9 out of 10 times the work is scrapped for a new plan that is brought up at the next 12 person room meeting.

Also, I get cced on about 1000 emails a day, delete 996 of them, and respond to the 4 that actually apply to me.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[horsepoor]

I spend part of my time telling people they can't keep doing what they are doing.

I spend part of my time trying to tell people how to do their job.

But I spend most of my time trying to get groups of people to do what my boss wants...and if I'm really good at it, those people think it was their idea in the first place.

That's sounds a lot like my job!  I try to get people to do their jobs correctly, but have no authority to make them do anything. 

I also know just enough about a bunch of things that I can figure out answers and try to explain them to managers so they can pretend to listen but ignore what I tell them.

[CopperTex]

He must be a pediatric immunologist....

Or a child photographer.

FIRE Artist nailed it. SuperMex failed as I am a she :)

[SuperMex]

That reminds me of the time my Soldier thought he was with a she but it ended up being a he. Oh never mind I am digressing........ :)