It is frequently the first question people ask you when they meet you, and sometimes it is more difficult to answer than one might think. It should be a softball question, one you can hit out of the park, and yet I find myself stumped by it frequently. I mean, not as my Super-hero self, mind you. I always have a good answer when I’m in uniform like “Oh, save the world from leaky faucets” or “keep America squeak and leaf free.” But when I’m protected by the super tool belt, few people ever ask me that. They ask me “can I have your autograph?” or “did you really build that yourself?” or “are you going to eat those Fritos?” (Actually, Wifegirl is the only one who ever asks me “are you going to eat those Fritos?”).
No, it is when I’m not in my supersuit that I have the most trouble with that question. And it gets harder and harder every year. When I was young I could easily answer with:
I’m in third grade.
I’m a student.
When I started getting jobs, they were defined by one task and so it was easy to answer:
I mow lawns.
I wash lunch trucks (and forage through the Tastykake pies that I’m supposed to load onto them).
I flip burgers.
As I got into late high school and early college, it got more complex, but still was pretty straightforward:
I serve dinner to senior citizens, and sometimes wheel them back to their apartments when they can’t make it on their own. Sometimes I make up their menus by crossing out the things they’re not allowed to eat like salt or fat.
I drive a Rosati Italian Water Ice truck. Not the kind that sells to the kids who are running down the street with a quarter in their hand and their little sister trailing behind; the kind that delivers to Woolworths and ice cream parlors and little league fields.
I repair A.V. equipment for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Well, I don’t actually repair it,I clean it and plug it in. If it works I wrap up the power cord and put a twist tie on it. If it sparks or makes a grinding noise, I put a repair tag on it and describe the noise or the color of the sparks.
For many years I was an organist at my church. One morning after Mass a man came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re pretty good. Do you do this in real life?” He saw the quizzical look on my face as I formulated an answer. [Hmmm…In real life…Hmmm…Is church not real life?] I was pleased with the answer that popped up in my glasses like they did in the “Terminator” movies. My answer was neither insulting nor used any swear words like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s answer, but was a simple:
Yes, but not by trade.
Soon I was out in the working world. It became tougher to answer “What do you do for a living” for several reasons. First, I didn’t do just one thing. Like in my first job for an AgChem company the answer was essentially:
I kill weeds.
But it was actually much more like:
I kill weeds while trying simultaneously to not kill the crop species, not cause harm to the environment or wildlife, and do so without breathing anything that will kill me or adversely affect my heretofore non-existent offspring.
And I found that girls in bars were not so impressed by:
I kill weeds.
So I learned to cloud the actual truth with corporate speak like:
In a challenging environment I subject the next generation of agricultural chemicals to a rigorous round of biological efficacy testing before they make it to the toxicological stage of testing.
That didn’t so much work with the girls in the bars, either. It only got harder when I moved from research on plants to research on animals. I found out quickly that I really had to shroud what I actually did for a living by what I in theory did for a living.
I’m looking for a way to protect the heart from the damage caused by an ischemic event.
That sounded better than what I really did which involved the hearts of many different species of animals. As the years went on, research increasing moved from the animal to the test tube. But there was a fundamental lack of understanding for the complexities of molecular biology and biochemistry, and if I used terms like “gene-splicing” or “cloning” people would either yell at me or get all weirded out. Invariably they would ask if I was making Dolly the Sheep. “No, I’m making IL-4” would be my answer, and they would get more weirded out thinking IL-4 was some humanized form of R2D2. So I began answering the “what do you do” question with:
I move minute amounts of liquid from one place to another with great precision.
By this point I was married, so I didn’t have to impress the girls in the bars. Most recently, however, I moved out of the labs and into the world of computers. I thought this might make it easier to answer the question, but it really didn’t. While in theory my answer should be:
I support the discovery research scientists with their data collection, reduction, and aggregation needs
it is really more like:
I tell people to “press the button.”
Because most of the time people call me with their computer problems, and most of the time they have a pretty good idea that their problem could mean the loss of a lot of work. So my job is to, in a very calm voice, tell them to do what they already know they have to do. It goes something like this:
Them: It says “Unspecified java error. Ignore or Abort.“ I already tried “Ignore.”
Me: Try clicking “Abort.”
Them: Are you sure?
Me: Oh, absolutely. (I’ve never seen this problem before in my life, and it’s not my data afterall.)
Them: OK. Here I go. Hey! It worked! Thanks, you’re a genius! (I love that part.)
And as I’ve progressed in my IT career, I have learned the wisdom of turning the machine off and turning it back on. So after 18 years of school and 28 years in the working world, my answer to the question “What do you do for a living” is:
I tell the people to turn it off and turn it back on.
I’m a genius.
