yeah because I have a real job (retail) not whispering to the lightning through the haunted frame like yall
Damn apparently you’re a poet too
I (programmer and team leader) get requests from the king (management and project manager) and pass them to the peasants (code monkeys), clean after their shit (QA and code review). I get peanuts in return while the king keep most of the loot.
Ah, so you’re the
grand viziercourt jester.That definitely define my everyday job experience.
That’s a challenge.
The job I do didn’t exist when I was in high school, and most of the technology it was built on didn’t exist until the early 1900s.
I suppose I could just call myself a general repairman and leave it at that.
I’m the guy who makes sure the castle is built to keep out the invaders. Only everything is made of captured lightning.
Gets burned at the stake
i’m teaching silicon rocks how to think
I am paid to perform other duties as assigned.
I’m somewhere between a clerk and a millwright, only I’m not recording any transactions and the machines I maintain don’t have anything to do with grain. Instead, they’re simple but very fast mathmatical machines the moneychangers had built to account for every penny that moves.
I can barely get my wife to understand virtualization/containerization and she’s very intelligent, let alone someone from the 18th century who couldn’t even comprehend what a computer was.
This likely has more to do with my shitty explaining ability than anything else. 😊
If someone working in semiconductor manufacturing were to answer this question they would probably have to say “I make sand think” and just walk away.
“You know how we dug out that trench to let some of the river through for irrigation, and then we fill it in for winter? Yeah I do that, but much smaller, and much faster, on sand. Got a shovel?”
I mean, yeah. The theater goes back to at least Ancient Greece. So they’d know what I’m talking about, even if the job duties have shifted slightly throughout the centuries.
Most likely yes, the organisation I work for would have been 200 years old at that stage.
I’m a postie.
I (a software engineer) am a high magician who fixes the spells other high magicians put into the magic box ages ago because the king wants them to do something other than whay they were originally designed to do.
Folks in 1700 understood what an engineer was. I’d just tell them I design really complicated looms.
I’d avoid magic on that one, since modern ideas about how magic works are pretty influenced by technology now. I suspect this would be gibberish to them.
How about “we have machines so complicated that it’s hard to set them, and my job is to try to change the settings on them and usually fail”?
We got this sand and tought it to do math. I give the math sand very specific instructions to do a task. There are many people like me, and a good chunk of them are giving the sand instructions to show silly cat pictures.
I’d go by ‘mechanical devices’, there were hardly any machines in our understanding back then.
Well, they did have clocks, even some early portable ones, and “automata” which were a bit like modern animatronics. Power applications like mills, too. I don’t know what word would work best, though.
I’m guessing they’d picture OP running around a giant room filled with clockwork, going at things with a pry bar and wedges. That is a bit like how computers worked in their first decade, albeit electrically rather than mechanically. Later in the 18th century they invented the punchcard loom, so that would be a good point of reference, but we’re all the way back in 1700.
Worth noting that the 1700s are, in fact, the 18th century. The first century was the years from 1-100, the second century from 101-200, etc.
But, yes. It was invented later in the 18th century than our audience came from.
Also a good point. It’s dumb that we’ve zero-indexed centuries and then given them one-indexed names, but that is the standard.
Well, it’s just how math and numbers in English work.
Cardinal numbers, the number of things you have, start with zero because you can have none of something (or less with negatives, but that’s neither here nor there).
Original numbers, Numbers that show which things were in what order (first, second, etc) start at one, because you can’t really have a zeroth something because then it would really be the first one.
So year 1 is 1 because it’s the first year, and it starts the first century. It would have been entirely possible for English to make the names a little nicer, but given that it isn’t, the math means the first set of one hundred years are the years before the one-hundredth year and cetera.
I mean, zeroth would still be zeroth; it’s just based on the cardinal the moment before it arrived rather than after, assuming you start with nothing and add objects. Unfortunately that’s not conventional, probably in any language, and so you get a situation where a positional notation clashes with how we want to talk about the larger divisions of it casually. This sort of thing is exactly why computer science does use zero indexing.
Relatedly, there was also no year 0; it goes straight from 1 BC to 1 AD.
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Yeah, something like “We have machines with thousands of switches that can do complicated things depending on how you set the switches. My job is flipping those switches so the machine performs the desired task as best as possible”…?
“what is this ‘switch’ of which thou speakest?”
A lever that influenced the workings of the machine, sir.
They’d understand perfectly. When my employers buy something, it’s my job to check that it arrives in good order and matches what we asked for, and then arrange for the sender to be paid.
Sometimes the thing is a piece of equipment for transmitting real-time video of tumours from one part of the country to another, but I don’t think we need to go into that.
I’m currently in college to go into GIS (Geographic Information Systems/Science) and lemme tell ya I think more people in 1700 would understand “cartographer” than they would today.
You are correct. People these days are idjits.
Not even really that but people tend to think that others have just outright stopped making maps. “Haven’t we made all the maps already?” Is a common response I get when I tell them. They seem to forget about data analysis and all that.
And, well… They’re not super wrong about how mapped earth is. They just misjudge the sheer, enormous amount of detail we need (which keeps growing with our ability to get more of it), along with the fact that sometimes it changes a bit.
“Haven’t we mapped everything already?” is a bit like saying “Haven’t we born everyone already?”.
GIS also is far more complex than what is visible in a single map. An example for this are the capabilities of satellites observing the earth, IIRC very few to none of them are mere security cameras - most of them have quite interesting spectra to observe green house gas emissions or vegetation (ie. land use changes) for example. GIS can then use this data and gather hidden information, sometimes over large spatial dimensions.
Exactly. We know what shape the land is even for the bottoms of the oceans. But that doesn’t mean we’re done making maps.
I’m a literal wizard. I spend hours writing in an esoteric language known only by those who study it in order to bend the world to my will and make things happen as I wish it.
The structure of my magic spells determine what the outcomes will be, and things can get really strange if you mess up the syntax.
