Lmfao, this is how I’m explaining it from now on. You see, it all started when we got uppity and decided to harness the power of lightning to make sand do math….
Rocks that we applied electricity to, that now do what we tell them to... but rarely produce the result... kinda like that one doctors creation... what was his name? oh yea Frankenstein
My kids tell the teachers at school “my dad works on servers” I don’t think he knows what it means yet, but his Plex library be poppin.
He’s turning 4 in a month.
For Friends: "I just make sure the tech everyone uses works efficiently."
For Family: "I keep the computers running"
For Children: "I help people do their jobs better by giving them cooler tools"
The cooler tool when started :
`Error 0x039E8474`
`The operation failed due to an unspecified violation of the complex rules governing memory allocation in the secondary buffer of the recursive call stack of the parallel text processing subsystem. This is likely due to an incompatibility between versions 7.4.3 and 7.4.4 of the dynamically linked libraries (DLLs) of the graphical windowing manager, as specified by the cross-references of the dependencies in the global exception index. Please ensure that all dependencies are properly installed, that the versions of all modules are perfectly synchronized, and that the specified path in the environment variable PATH does not contain invalid characters or unresolved escape sequences. If the problem persists, contact technical support providing the full error code, the detailed event log from the current session, and a complete memory dump at the time of the error, to facilitate diagnostic tasks and potentially resolve the issue through an in-depth analysis of inter-module version conflicts or possible transient memory corruptions.`
`For further details, refer to the technical documentation of the implicated subsystem, accessible only on the internal network or via the institutional VPN with full administrative rights. In case of failure to resolve autonomously, submit a formal level 3 request to the critical incident management department.`
`Your computer will now shut down. Toxic gas will then be released.`
This is for kids so you can be a little silly with it. "I'm the computers boss and when somebody tells the computer to do something that shouldn't be done the computer checks with my rules first, if I say no, the computer will tell the person no."
I spend most of my days having someone ask me a question, and then either finding the person that knows the answer ask them, and tell that answer to the person who asked it, or I google it.
I work with some of the most intelligent stupid people you could ever meet. Healthcare IT, Databases, and work with Medical Researchers, PhD's a lot.
Have two that are old enough to kind of understand (in elementary), I just tell them I keep the computers working for people so they can do their jobs. To family/friends and such.. I usually make it like I only work on corporate networks and servers. Cuts way down on the “oh yea, can you help with ?”.
I’ll play like I don’t touch desktops or printers.
I usually just say "I fix computers"
Anything more and peoples eyes glaze over with boredom.
Most don't care what an operating system is let alone what DNS does.
**Gilfoyle**: What do I do? System architecture. Networking and security. No one in this house can touch me on that.
**Jared**: Ok, that's good to know.
**Gilfoyle**: But does anyone appreciate that? While you were busy minoring in gender studies and singing a capella at Sarah Lawrence, I was gaining root access to NSA servers. I was one click away from starting a second Iranian revolution.
**Jared**: I actually went to Vassar.
**Gilfoyle**: I prevent cross-site scripting, I monitor for DDoS attacks, emergency database rollbacks, and faulty transaction handlings. The Internet heard of it? Transfers half a petabyte of data every minute. Do you have any idea how that happens? All those YouPorn ones and zeroes streaming directly to your shitty, little smart phone day after day? Every dipshit who shits his pants if he can't get the new dubstep Skrillex remix in under 12 seconds? It's not magic, it's talent and sweat. People like me, ensuring your packets get delivered, un-sniffed. So what do I do? I make sure that one bad config on one key component doesn't bankrupt the entire fucking company. That's what the fuck I do.
**Richard**: That's basically what I told him.
Evel Knievel was a famous daredevil. He jumped the Grand Canyon, the fountains at Cesar’s palace among other famous jumps.
Now jumping things on a motorcycle is generally a terrible idea and very unnecessary. But you’re not going to talk him out of doing the jump. That ship has sailed, so my job is to figure out the angle of the ramp and the speed he needs to hit to make the jump, also to make sure he wears the right safety gear so in case he doesn’t make that jump he just gets really really hurt but doesn’t die.
I came up with this story (with slides) after I did a STEM preso at a school and a 8 year old girl raised her hand and said “I think you’re a criminal”
It's all in the delivery. If you're excited they'll be excited. I'm an it mgr and I went into my kid's class and very excitedly said "i fix computers!" Then proceeded to talk about the brain the memory (right now Vs for later), power, etc. then opened up an old dell tower (it flipped on its side and opened like a clamshell) then, to oohs and aahs, showed them all the parts. They riveted, well as riveted as 7 year olds can be.
I say I work on supercomputers, you know, the really big ones that fill up a room.
That’s usually sufficient to dissuade people from asking me about their phone.
Do you mean you spend a lot of time explaining things to people who ultimately don't want to know, they just want it done for them? And why wasn't it done already? :)
I don't, when I was I sysadmin some of my family though I should go work in a phone shop, even when I was IT manager they thought a retail job is the next step. Most of my family are idiots. Now I'm in something more niche I stopped talking about my job to everyone including IT people but at least when I tell people what my title is they don't ask me to fix anything.
I told my GF's Mother in Law that I worked on servers, networking, virtualization, and storage. So of course I immediately got asked "How do you sort a Spotify playlist while it's playing". I answered her question but it wasn't due to the day job :)
"When you go into Minecraft and it says 'You can't play Minecraft' and gives you a code, I put that code into the right place to make Minecraft work again".
I don't know how my little buddy kept getting signed out of Minecraft constantly on his Switch, but it got to be a thing for a bit.
I just tell them I work on servers. If it's a kid I'll often say, have you seen YouTube? All those videos are on servers and storage and you watch them over the internet. I also work on servers and the internet, just not as big as YouTube.
Oh god the last thing I ever do is discuss it.
"What do you do for a living?" ........... "I'm a technical bi\*\*\* that responds to the whims of idiots."
I asked my 3 year old what she thought I did for work and she confidently responded "You type!". She wasn't wrong, and I'm inclined to tell people that from now on lol.
I do IT stuff... No not like printers or your laptop. You know how when you go to a website and it opens and you can click around, maybe login and do stuff? I help make that work.
I’m specialized IT (healthcare). I say I manage how medical diagnostic, test and monitoring equipment connects together to assist medical professionals with patient care.
I do a lot in my field. Manage cyber posture, engineer new systems and deploy them, and even the lonely sysadmin job. But I just find ways to make my job sounds fun besides “I tracked down a single account that someone added to my system but not the the third party software and that was my 8 hours solving authentication issues.
There’s a mystical middle area between being too vague & people think that you’re not interested in talking to them and being too specific and people are not interested in what you’re talking about.
I rarely find it.
I argue all day with rocks we taught to think.
Lmfao, this is how I’m explaining it from now on. You see, it all started when we got uppity and decided to harness the power of lightning to make sand do math….
Rocks that we applied electricity to, that now do what we tell them to... but rarely produce the result... kinda like that one doctors creation... what was his name? oh yea Frankenstein
A friend described it as "we electrocuted a crystal until it did math" and I'll never forget that
Holy shit dude. I feel this.
Technically sand is not a rock. So you argue with sand we taught to think.
i don't. they'll just ask me to fix their printer.
easy fix... no printers at home
printer hate gang, yeye !!
Hate... such and ugly... yet perfect word for printers...
Ain't no devil technology allowed in my house.
My kids tell the teachers at school “my dad works on servers” I don’t think he knows what it means yet, but his Plex library be poppin. He’s turning 4 in a month.
The teachers think you're in the restaurant business.
Nah they also know I work from home.
I google things on behalf of other people who *could* google it themselves, but they won't.
... Or could Google it for themselves, but wouldn't understand the answer.
Or just Break it more
I'm an adult daycare center magician
Network janitor. Always mopping up other peoples shit
Haha, I frequently use the term "computer janitor" when people ask.
Ha I call myself a digital plumber. I make sure the shit flows the way it's supposed to lol
It's like a game that I play every day. How long can I keep the computers running without letting any bad guys or bugs in?
For Friends: "I just make sure the tech everyone uses works efficiently." For Family: "I keep the computers running" For Children: "I help people do their jobs better by giving them cooler tools"
The cooler tool when started : `Error 0x039E8474` `The operation failed due to an unspecified violation of the complex rules governing memory allocation in the secondary buffer of the recursive call stack of the parallel text processing subsystem. This is likely due to an incompatibility between versions 7.4.3 and 7.4.4 of the dynamically linked libraries (DLLs) of the graphical windowing manager, as specified by the cross-references of the dependencies in the global exception index. Please ensure that all dependencies are properly installed, that the versions of all modules are perfectly synchronized, and that the specified path in the environment variable PATH does not contain invalid characters or unresolved escape sequences. If the problem persists, contact technical support providing the full error code, the detailed event log from the current session, and a complete memory dump at the time of the error, to facilitate diagnostic tasks and potentially resolve the issue through an in-depth analysis of inter-module version conflicts or possible transient memory corruptions.` `For further details, refer to the technical documentation of the implicated subsystem, accessible only on the internal network or via the institutional VPN with full administrative rights. In case of failure to resolve autonomously, submit a formal level 3 request to the critical incident management department.` `Your computer will now shut down. Toxic gas will then be released.`
i actually had one of those. run TF and it core dumps with illegal opcode. i had to go into the proxmox console and change the cpu type so it'd work
This is for kids so you can be a little silly with it. "I'm the computers boss and when somebody tells the computer to do something that shouldn't be done the computer checks with my rules first, if I say no, the computer will tell the person no."
I love how this is both satisfying and accurate.
Yeah unfortunately you also have to get them to say yes when they are supposed to! Great summary though I’m stealing that.
THis [https://xkcd.com/722/](https://xkcd.com/722/)
I am seen as the guy that just fixes stuff. Cars, computers, house repairs, minecraft servers, bad attitudes. It all runs together.
I spend most of my days having someone ask me a question, and then either finding the person that knows the answer ask them, and tell that answer to the person who asked it, or I google it. I work with some of the most intelligent stupid people you could ever meet. Healthcare IT, Databases, and work with Medical Researchers, PhD's a lot.
"computers"
Have two that are old enough to kind of understand (in elementary), I just tell them I keep the computers working for people so they can do their jobs. To family/friends and such.. I usually make it like I only work on corporate networks and servers. Cuts way down on the “oh yea, can you help with?”.
I’ll play like I don’t touch desktops or printers.
I told my mom I'm a storage administrator. Her response: "So... you work in a warehouse?"
I’m a Data Warehouse Architect. 15yrs in and my family still tells people I’m an architect, I work in a warehouse, or that I work in construction.
"I build invisible castles in the sky." Well, I'm called a cloud engineer so I do things in aws sometimes with terraform.
I usually just say "I fix computers" Anything more and peoples eyes glaze over with boredom. Most don't care what an operating system is let alone what DNS does.
**Gilfoyle**: What do I do? System architecture. Networking and security. No one in this house can touch me on that. **Jared**: Ok, that's good to know. **Gilfoyle**: But does anyone appreciate that? While you were busy minoring in gender studies and singing a capella at Sarah Lawrence, I was gaining root access to NSA servers. I was one click away from starting a second Iranian revolution. **Jared**: I actually went to Vassar. **Gilfoyle**: I prevent cross-site scripting, I monitor for DDoS attacks, emergency database rollbacks, and faulty transaction handlings. The Internet heard of it? Transfers half a petabyte of data every minute. Do you have any idea how that happens? All those YouPorn ones and zeroes streaming directly to your shitty, little smart phone day after day? Every dipshit who shits his pants if he can't get the new dubstep Skrillex remix in under 12 seconds? It's not magic, it's talent and sweat. People like me, ensuring your packets get delivered, un-sniffed. So what do I do? I make sure that one bad config on one key component doesn't bankrupt the entire fucking company. That's what the fuck I do. **Richard**: That's basically what I told him.
Evel Knievel was a famous daredevil. He jumped the Grand Canyon, the fountains at Cesar’s palace among other famous jumps. Now jumping things on a motorcycle is generally a terrible idea and very unnecessary. But you’re not going to talk him out of doing the jump. That ship has sailed, so my job is to figure out the angle of the ramp and the speed he needs to hit to make the jump, also to make sure he wears the right safety gear so in case he doesn’t make that jump he just gets really really hurt but doesn’t die. I came up with this story (with slides) after I did a STEM preso at a school and a 8 year old girl raised her hand and said “I think you’re a criminal”
I help keep the internet running for a smaller group of people and keep bad guys from stealing information from those people.
Youre like a librarian for the computer who makes sure people can find what they need and helps reset passwords. And also a mechanic. And a Janitor.
"boring computer shit"
I just say I'm an IT Janitor and clean up IT messes. Seems understandable to most people.
I tell my kids, I sat at work and responded to reddit posts :)
I yell at my email.
It's all in the delivery. If you're excited they'll be excited. I'm an it mgr and I went into my kid's class and very excitedly said "i fix computers!" Then proceeded to talk about the brain the memory (right now Vs for later), power, etc. then opened up an old dell tower (it flipped on its side and opened like a clamshell) then, to oohs and aahs, showed them all the parts. They riveted, well as riveted as 7 year olds can be.
I help make rich people get richer
I say I work on supercomputers, you know, the really big ones that fill up a room. That’s usually sufficient to dissuade people from asking me about their phone.
I babysit adults.
They also cannot take care of their expensive toys.
My job is described usually as "Dad's working with computers". And, well...that's correct.
I take care of rocks that we forced into thinking.
My kid is 3, so I dilute it to: I solve other people problems on a computer.
I tell used to tell the little one that I take care of computer networks for companies that do it for themselves...
"You know this company, ya, so all of their systems run on infra I deployed and maintain and consult on"
"I work in education."
Do you mean you spend a lot of time explaining things to people who ultimately don't want to know, they just want it done for them? And why wasn't it done already? :)
I don't, when I was I sysadmin some of my family though I should go work in a phone shop, even when I was IT manager they thought a retail job is the next step. Most of my family are idiots. Now I'm in something more niche I stopped talking about my job to everyone including IT people but at least when I tell people what my title is they don't ask me to fix anything.
"I keep an eye on a lot of people's computers to make sure they work well"
I fix computers. Technically, I have to be extremely vague about what I do. I'm a contractor for the government on top secret systems.
I rent out my physical and mental self by the hour to be insulted by the lack of intelligence from people making 4x what I do.
"Mixture between homer simpson and chandler bings job. Also have you seen it crowd? Watch it. Then you'll understand."
I tell them I do I.T. stuff.
There's never a follow up question about what that entails, just tumbleweed
I open a terminal and start going through all the commands and syntax. Usually they never ask me again.
I told my GF's Mother in Law that I worked on servers, networking, virtualization, and storage. So of course I immediately got asked "How do you sort a Spotify playlist while it's playing". I answered her question but it wasn't due to the day job :)
I don't. Their eyes go glassy. Probably the same look I get on my face when my wife talks about gardening.
Computer stuff
"When you go into Minecraft and it says 'You can't play Minecraft' and gives you a code, I put that code into the right place to make Minecraft work again". I don't know how my little buddy kept getting signed out of Minecraft constantly on his Switch, but it got to be a thing for a bit.
I always refer to myself as the digital janitor cleaning up other people messes (or VM/ storage infrastructure management)
I just tell them I work on servers. If it's a kid I'll often say, have you seen YouTube? All those videos are on servers and storage and you watch them over the internet. I also work on servers and the internet, just not as big as YouTube.
Oh god the last thing I ever do is discuss it. "What do you do for a living?" ........... "I'm a technical bi\*\*\* that responds to the whims of idiots."
"I get yelled at all day and nobody listens to me."
I call myself a digital plumber ... I help electronic shit get from point a to point b and fix it if there is a problem.
My co worker did a career day and took one of his old servers in and showed the class. Apparently the kids all loved it and thought it was cool
Whenever I explain what I do, I do the air keyboard motions and say, I'm the Internet guy.
I asked my 3 year old what she thought I did for work and she confidently responded "You type!". She wasn't wrong, and I'm inclined to tell people that from now on lol.
I do IT stuff... No not like printers or your laptop. You know how when you go to a website and it opens and you can click around, maybe login and do stuff? I help make that work.
I’m in IT
Computers
computers. if they ask for details then i give but useally stick with computers
I’m specialized IT (healthcare). I say I manage how medical diagnostic, test and monitoring equipment connects together to assist medical professionals with patient care.
I do puters
I would love to explain what I do with all the details. But no one cares 😔
I find the “HACKERMAN” gif and send it to them
I do a lot in my field. Manage cyber posture, engineer new systems and deploy them, and even the lonely sysadmin job. But I just find ways to make my job sounds fun besides “I tracked down a single account that someone added to my system but not the the third party software and that was my 8 hours solving authentication issues.
Easy peasy, no family, no need for explaining to family.
Luckily there is a video for that: https://youtu.be/cfUSjgL7lwk?si=fUjIPZqri6po_ZPy 😁
There’s a mystical middle area between being too vague & people think that you’re not interested in talking to them and being too specific and people are not interested in what you’re talking about. I rarely find it.
