I\u2019m a student.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0When I started getting jobs, they were defined by one task and so it was easy to answer:<\/p>\n \u00a0I mow lawns.<\/em><\/p>\n I wash lunch trucks (and forage through the Tastykake pies that I\u2019m supposed to load onto them).<\/em><\/p>\n I flip burgers.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0As I got into late high school and early college, it got more complex, but still was pretty straightforward:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I serve dinner to senior citizens, and sometimes wheel them back to their apartments when they can\u2019t make it on their own.\u00a0 Sometimes I make up their menus by crossing out the things they\u2019re not allowed to eat like salt or fat.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I drive a Rosati Italian Water Ice truck.\u00a0 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.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I repair A.V. equipment for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.\u00a0 Well, I don\u2019t actually repair it,I clean it and plug it in.\u00a0 If it works I wrap up the power cord and put a twist tie on it.\u00a0 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.<\/em><\/p>\n For many years I was an organist at my church.\u00a0 One morning after Mass a man came up to me and said, \u201cHey, you\u2019re pretty good.\u00a0 Do you do this in real life?\u201d\u00a0 He saw the quizzical look on my face as I formulated an answer.\u00a0 [Hmmm\u2026In real life\u2026Hmmm\u2026Is church not real life?]\u00a0 I was pleased with the answer that popped up in my glasses like they did in the \u201cTerminator\u201d movies.\u00a0 My answer was neither insulting nor used any swear words like Arnold Schwarzenegger\u2019s answer, but was a simple:<\/p>\n Yes, but not by trade.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Soon I was out in the working world.\u00a0 It became tougher to answer \u201cWhat do you do for a living\u201d for several reasons.\u00a0 First, I didn\u2019t do just one thing.\u00a0 Like in my first job for an AgChem company the answer was essentially:<\/p>\n \u00a0I kill weeds.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0But it was actually much more like:<\/p>\n \u00a0I 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.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0And I found that girls in bars were not so impressed by:<\/p>\n \u00a0I kill weeds.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0So I learned to cloud the actual truth with corporate speak like:<\/p>\n \u00a0In 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.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>That didn\u2019t so much work with the girls in the bars, either.\u00a0 It only got harder when I moved from research on plants to research on animals.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0I\u2019m looking for a way to protect the heart from the damage caused by an ischemic event.<\/em><\/p>\n That sounded better than what I really did which involved the hearts of many different species of animals.\u00a0 As the years went on, research increasing moved from the animal to the test tube.\u00a0 But there was a fundamental lack of understanding for the complexities of molecular biology and biochemistry, and if I used terms like \u201cgene-splicing\u201d or \u201ccloning\u201d people would either yell at me or get all weirded out.\u00a0 Invariably they would ask if I was making Dolly the Sheep. \u00a0\u00a0\u201cNo, I\u2019m making IL-4\u201d would be my answer, and they would get more weirded out thinking IL-4 was some humanized form of R2D2.\u00a0 So I began answering the \u201cwhat do you do\u201d question with:<\/p>\n \u00a0I move minute amounts of liquid from one place to another with great precision.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>By this point I was married, so I didn\u2019t have to impress the girls in the bars.\u00a0 Most recently, however, I moved out of the labs and into the world of computers.\u00a0 I thought this might make it easier to answer the question, but it really didn\u2019t.\u00a0 While in theory my answer should be:<\/p>\n \u00a0I support the discovery research scientists with their data collection, reduction, and aggregation needs<\/em><\/p>\n it is really more like:<\/p>\n \u00a0I tell people to \u201cpress the button.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 So my job is to, in a very calm voice, tell them to do what they already know they have to do.\u00a0 It goes something like this:<\/p>\n Them: It says \u201cUnspecified java error.\u00a0 Ignore or Abort.\u201c I already tried \u201cIgnore.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Me: Try clicking \u201cAbort.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Them: Are you sure?<\/em><\/p>\n Me: Oh, absolutely.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve never seen this problem before in my life, and it\u2019s not my data afterall.)<\/em><\/p>\n Them: OK.\u00a0 Here I go.\u00a0 Hey!\u00a0 It worked!\u00a0 Thanks, you\u2019re a genius! (I love that part.)<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0And as I\u2019ve progressed in my IT career, I have learned the wisdom of turning the machine off and turning it back on.\u00a0 So after 18 years of school and 28 years in the working world, my answer to the question \u201cWhat do you do for a living\u201d is:<\/p>\n \u00a0I tell the people to turn it off and turn it back on.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m a genius.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 It should be a softball question, one you can hit out of the park, and yet I find myself stumped by it frequently.\u00a0 I mean, not as my Super-hero self, … Continue reading “What Do You Do For a Living?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[9,22,11],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","hentry","category-knowledgebase","category-uncategorized","tag-humor","tag-occupation","tag-superhero","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"rosati](\"http:\/\/homeownerman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/rosati-water-ice-II.png\")
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