What's something people incorrectly assume about your line of work and/or hobby?

That because I'm punk and a mosher I must be aggressive and do lots of drugs. i'm only aggressive to shit people who deserve it lol

Mosh pits are surprisingly wholesome if you're not familiar with them. To an outside observer it just looks like a bunch of aggro idiots beating each other up. To the people in the pit it's an amazing shared experience of like-minded people, there to enjoy the same thing, having a great time and helping each other up when they fall. The right pit is a sea of positivity, community and endorphins.
- I like peaceful hippie jam band noodly noodling nowadays. However, I was born in a mosh pit. There is a time and a place and appropriate selections when it comes to more ”Cerebral Matters” , shall we say. It’s all about keeping the positive vibe a go go! Keep it surreal, friendly and safe. Btw, ya’ll new kittens. Doooo Not! Forget ya’lls safe word(s).
What about the drug part?
- never done illegal drugs but sometimes I get zooted on z drugs bc I have insomnia

Used to be that because I was an expert on Apple platforms, that must mean I can fix a Windows computer. I hadn't the first clue where anything was. I've since learned, however. Because of work. Oh well.

Did I know how printers work and can fix their printer.

Look, I have a computer science degree (utterly pointless qualification folks don't get one) and I work in cyber security. I haven't got a clue how those fuckers work, I don't know get a brother or something they seem to be fine.

Printers are so cheap nowadays that the solution to every problem is to buy a new one. Paper jam? Out of ink? Random pages coming out with grayscale pictures of demonic forces? Lost the power cable? Buy a new one

Software engineering.

Most people don't have a clue what we do. Especially management. Most people think we're code factory workers, just writing code all day. In reality, it is closer to being an artist than it is a factory worker. There's a ton of thinking, discussion, design, and unfortunately politicking.

Thats interesting. I am one of those people who assumed the job was pretty much just coding all day on some team project. What does your day to day routine look like?
- It can vary a lot depending on the day and the company/job. Frequently there are meetings that are update/planning discussions, discussions with one or more other engineers on how to build a given feature, debugging existing code to figure out why it's not doing the thing we want (which is a different but overlapping skill set with coding).
  Ultimately there isn't really a "typical" day because we wear a lot of different hats. My current job is more coding heavy because I'm at a small startup with only a couple of engineers. In a given week I'm probably doing 10% meetings, 50% coding/debugging/configuration, 20% code review (reviewing other people's code), and 20% thinking/designing/experimenting with ideas. Those numbers vary a lot though. At a previous job I ended up spending an entire week just doing project management to alleviate my boss' anxiety over a project (which was somewhat self defeating because it meant I wasn't getting work done on said project). That job in particular had a lot of politicking and communication which was due to micromanagement.
  A lot of what people don't realize is that we aren't just building a feature. We're building a feature while thinking ahead to known or potential future features. How can we build feature A to enable making features B, C, and D easier/better/faster without also making feature E much more difficult or impossible? It's about building flexibility into the system while also balancing against time and cost restrictions. We as engineers have things that we see as necessary while the business wants more features and it's necessary to balance the two. At a healthy org that means that there's a negotiation of priorities between the two forces. If you only focus on the technical stuff, you won't ship features. If you only focus on the features, how fast you can deliver features will come to a grinding halt. Your system will also start breaking in unexpected ways which takes time away from building features.
  It's kinda a rambly response to your question but I hope it helps.
Hey collegue!
Fully agree with you. People think anything can be done with Software. But often not really and we just create a work around. Its always funny to see people think developing is easy and then get shattered by reality. Sometimes you just sit there, screaming for why it doesnt work!...then you see you set the wrong variable.
Sometimes you are an artist, sometimes a high mathematician, sometimes a wizard and sometimes you want to get an axe and hack your computer

Skydiving

Skydivers are not adrenaline (epinephrine) junkies. Adrenaline actually makes you feel terrible. You know that rush and shakes you get when you get hungry? Yeah, THAT'S an adrenaline rush.

No, we go for the same thing runners do. Endorphins. Nature's own anti-depressant.

I assumed you guys did it for the view. I'd do it but I'm afraid of heights.
This is very enlightening. Great way of framing the difference between the two.

People assume programmers know all about hacking. Because we "know about computers."

Can you hack Roblox?
- Can't everybody?

People are always amazed at how physically active embroidery is at an industrial scale. Everybody thinks it's just sitting around with an oldschool hoop, but I'm up and down the length of an 8ft machine all day, embroidering the same design on 6 garments at once.

I think the most I ever did was 300 garments in an 8 hour workday, but I put 17k steps on my fitbit and was dead tired afterwards.

Edit:oh heck it was more steps than that

What do you use? Our shop has a Tajima T-MAR
- We're running with the Barudan BEKY, but they run .dst files too.

User end hands on IT for the elderly.

that it's hard. "Oh I could never do your job"

It's literally a customer service job with tech paint. Reboot the device. Don't yell at the decrepit person doing their best in a digital world. Collect check and praise.

The amount of times I've been called a genius for relogging into someone's email is greater than 7.

Yeah. Real hard.

Don't yell at the decrepit person doing their best in a digital world.
I think this is the part some people might struggle with
- Every time it gets difficult I imagine cleaning week old fry grease out of the fryer with a coat hanger because it was so clogged. I was making less then.
  I love context. It helps so much.
  Honestly it's only bad when they come at it like they know more than you do. 1 out of 100 in my very lucky experience.
Lol, I was the computer genius in my office job because I knew how to change the paper size on the printer from Letter to A4. Soak up the praise!
- It's one of those things I'd probably have to Google because how many times do you do that, but yeah think most people just give up when they hit a technical problem and stop thinking.

"Accountants spend most of their time preparing tax"

No, hardly any time is spent on tax. Management accountants and auditors don't do tax work at all.

People praise me up for "saving the bees". Honey bees don't need saving. It's the other bees that do, the hundreds of species of bumblebees, mining bees, solitary bees etc etc. Bees that are outcompeted in some areas due to the number of hobbyist beekeepers and commercial bee farms. I'm one of the baddies.

I have red-belted bumblebees living inside the wall of my house. We need to fix the broken light fixture they're using to gain access, but I dun wanna kick them out, haha.
I have a wildlife garden with lots of wild plants and insects and stuff. I thought I was helping the bees but I mean just helping some body make artisanal honey to sell to me at the craft fair?
- No, you're helping all the other pollinators too! Keep a corner of your garden nice and rough, with tumbled bricks or rocks, twigs, dead leaves etc to make a wee nesting spot for bumblebees.
I've always been interested in the business side of beekeeping, do you rent out for pollination and is it worth doing?
- We get free use of a spot next to an apple orchard, so I guess pollination is our "rent", plus some honey. I don't know what arrangement commercial beekeepers have - near us they move 60+ hives in when the oilseed rape (canola) is flowering, then move them again when it's finished. A guy I was talking to said they reckon they can break even with 300 hives, because one person can deal with that many. More than that they have to employ someone else, and bang go the profits. Sounds like a nightmare. I struggle to cope with 7 hives!

That I spend all day coding, I spend most my day reading. Code usually but still

That's so fucking true. If I'm honest its usually trying to figure out how the fuck something actually is supposed to work. Its either by searching stuff online or changing single lines of code until it finally works.

I'm working with computers => I can fix their windows problems.

Nope. If I work on windows, and it eats itself for no reason, I call IT. I don't waste my time on that crap software.

I actually do enjoy human interaction (to a reasonable degree).

And what do you do?
- It’s tough to describe but I work in Theater & Performing Arts.

Software dev and game dev: Being lazy, it not being a real job, not much effort, it being easy, everyone is a super genius, AI will replace us

I’m in engineering. If I tell someone I work for the phone company they think I work on phones. Not sure what my mom thinks I do.

I'm in school for electrical engineering. Everyone I tell that to then says they are going to hire me to fix the electrical issues at their house.

Therapists are not "always analysing" you.

Seriously, you gotta pay me before I'll spend the energy to do that

My ex girlfriend is a therapist, and she was CONSTANTLY "analyzing" me, even when I begged her to turn that shit off and just be my girlfriend.
- Count Dracula doesn't like in a castle because he's a vampire.
  He lives in a castle because he's a count
I feel like even after paying therapists don't do much
- Sucks that you've not found them helpful.
  Therapy can be great, a place to get stuff that's hard to find in the day to day life.
  But it's not the only place to get that stuff. So I hope whatever it is you need, you find a place that works for you.
unless they are autistic. Then they analyse every little twitch

That I can make the band suck less. Sure, there’s something to be said about polishing a shit... But ultimately, it’s shit in>shit out. Your guitar doesn’t sound like ass because of the EQ; it sounds like ass because the guitarist had nine beers before he even walked on stage, and he can’t stay on beat to save his goddamned life.

Psychoacoustics is a fascinating subject. Just like placebo, people will fool themselves into thinking that something sounds good or bad, simply because they want it to. I always keep a DFA fader on my console, for when random people walk up and have suggestions. I make an adjustment to the DFA fader, they smile and nod to themselves, and then walk away. DFA means “Does Fuck All”. It’s literally a fader that isn’t doing anything at all. It’s not in the mix, it’s not in the monitors. It’s just a spare fader. But by adjusting the DFA, audience members will feel like I took them seriously, and they’ll placebo themselves into thinking that I took their advice.

To be clear, not all audience advice is bad advice. But for every “it’s too loud” complaint, you’ll inevitably get an equal and opposite “it’s too quiet”. There’s a reason music festivals have their audio console fenced off with a very wide perimeter. It’s specifically so drunken audience members can’t just saunter up and start yelling suggestions. That shit is distracting and 99% of the time is entirely unproductive.

- There is one instance where I have heard of a literal Suck Button. Gonna copy and paste it here…
  Not my story, but I like to read it again from time to time and get a good chuckle:
  My band’s drummer, John, is also a sound guy; for several years before we hooked up musically, he had been doing sound for other bands I was in, as well as for touring acts I booked shows for. He’s very good at what he does, and has a pretty massive rig. Anyway, he’s the nicest guy in the world at band practice, at Burger King, or at a gig we’re playing, but when he’s running sound for other bands, he can be pretty crabby.
  Very little patience for bands who start late or end late. Even less patience for bands who take an encore when they’re the second band playing out of five. Very little patience for singers who ask for more vocals in the monitor while cupping the microphone ball in both hands (feedback, anyone?) In general, just an altogether grouchy sound man.
  For example, he ran sound once for this seven- or eight piece ska band. One of the trombone players said he needed two mics: one for his horn and one for his backup vocals. Normally at this venue (a 120-seater), John didn’t bother to mic horns at all. Rolling his eyes, John put up a Shure Beta 58 and some AKG condenser mic. “This Shure is for your vocals, and this AKG is for your horn, OK?” he said. “Don’t blow your horn into the vocal mic, because your horn is about 30db louder than your voice and I’m going to have everything mixed properly.” Horn player nods his head. During the second song of the set, apparently this trombonist was set to get a solo. Right before his solo starts, he grabs both mics and pushes them close together, so that the capsules are actually touching. He then blows this fortissimo opening note into BOTH mics. I was sitting at a table in back, by the sound board, at the time. John’s limiters caught most of it, and I STILL had ringing in my ears for two days. At the end of the song, John mutes both of the guy’s mics (and leaves them mute), and basically threatens to ream out the guy’s plumbing with his own horn if he ever pulls that shit again. John does this through his talkback mic, which is clearly audible over the monitors. The crowd bursts into laughter, and the horn player goes bright red in the face.
  At any rate, for years I had heard John threaten bands with the “suck button.” Bands who were taking too long to set up, or whose members repeatedly refused to follow reasonable directions (please keep that vocal mic away from the monitors!), would be threatened. “Pull that shit again, and I’m gonna hit the suck button on you guys!” I took it to mean that he would intentionally make them sound bad, but he never followed through on the threat, so I took it as a vague general warning.
  So anyway, a little while back he’s running sound on a four band show. The second band, a Matchbox 20/Train kind of band, has him running 20 minutes behind before they even play a note because their lead guitarist was late. Their allotted set time is 40 minutes, but their last song runs over and by the time it’s done, they’ve played for almost 45 minutes. John says quietly over the talkback mic, “Hey guys, you’re done.” The lead singer says loudly over the vocal mic “Sound man says we gotta get off the stage. We got one more song for you!” as they kick into another soupy jangle-rock tune. John shakes his head at me. Then, the most amazing thing happened. After their “encore,” this band kicks straight into ANOTHER song without announcing it, apparently in the hope that John wouldn’t notice it was a different song.
  John leans over to me to be heard over the PA and asks, “Hey, wanna see the suck button?” “Sure,” I replied. I figured he was going to muck with the levels or just turn them off or something. Instead, he reaches to one of his racks and starts scrolling through patches on his trusty DigiTech unit. Sure enough, he gets to a patch titled SUCK BUTTON. He engages it, and all hell breaks loose onstage. The lead singer and the lead guitarist (who was singing backup), immediately start to sing WAY off key. They try to get back in tune, fail, trail off in mid-line, try again, and start glaring at each other. The guitarist is so distracted by this that he starts muffing the chord progression. If not for the drummer, I think the whole song would have derailed. For the entire four minute duration of the song, I was treated to this asshole band sounding like crap and getting madder and madder at each other. John explained the patch to me; basically it pitch shifts all tracks from the vocal submix up one step, BUT ONLY IN THE MONITORS. So the audience, out in front of the mains, was treated to the sound of two guys trying to get in tune, only to be utterly confused. If they got it sounding right in the monitors, they could tell that something was grossly wrong in the mains. And each of the singers thought it was the other guy who was singing out of tune. I just about died laughing.
When I worked in retail, I'd have customers ask me to raise or lower the temperature in the store I worked at. "Of course!" I'd say and then disappear into the back area and play on my phone for a couple of minutes. I'd come back out and ask if it was starting to feel better, to which they'd reply, "I feel it working already, thank you!"
At my home venue, I have no protection. If you fuck with me---particularly within the first twoish songs of a set---my usual response is to look them dead in the eye and say, "Where do you work? I'm going to come to your job and help you on Monday." And that usually scares them off.
Sometimes, I feel bad about it and will find and apologize to that person later, explaining why I reacted like that.
My favorite is when it's a local/college-age band and parents are around. Or spouses of older band members. "No, I can't get her vocal any louder because she's whispering six inches from the microphone and Jimi Hendrix up there is blasting his amp at 11."
All this said, it's a common misconception that "asshole" is the default mode of operation for a sound engineer. It's just that the job is fucking stressful, and if you catch us at the height of that stress, we will react poorly. I've definitely come across a few grumps, but most folks are nice on average --- kinda have to be so that people will want to work with you. Most of us just want to work with the team to make a good show happen.
To your original point, it's 100% true that the better the artist, the better/easier the mix. Can only polish a turd so much before it crumbles.
- My favorite is when it's a local/college-age band and parents are around. Or spouses of older band members. "No, I can't get her vocal any louder because she's whispering six inches from the microphone and Jimi Hendrix up there is blasting his amp at 11."
  There’s a reason the lead singer’s girlfriend is the butt of so many jokes. And I have 100% had to use the Baffle of Shame for guitarists who won’t turn down. It’s just a doghouse made out of pink foam board and tape, that you can throw over the top of problem amps. Add a corner notch for cables to run in/out, and dust it in some black paint.
  If it’s a tube amp, I can at least understand it; Tubes distort at higher volumes, and the distortion is part of the tone. And if you try to argue with a guitarist about their tone, you’ll lose every time. The nice once will smile and nod, then not make any changes when you ask them to turn down. The rude ones will make direct eye contact as they turn it up more.
  But if it’s a solid state amp, putting a 2x4 block under it (or putting it on a spare guitar stand) to tip it towards their head usually works. The guitarist is used to having all of the sound blow right past their knees, so actually aiming it at their head makes a world of difference.

It's frugal.

... It's not. Yarn is expensive as hell, even more so if you want any type of durability or wearability or comfort.

A co worker asked my partner if she could knit her a sweater like the one she was wearing. She wore a gorgeous, fitted, bespoke sweater she made herself. She quoted her 1200 euro. Needless to say, she didnt get the commission.
It’s crazy – I have a really nice oversized jumper, and people who’ve known I knit have asked if I made it. Lol no, it would have cost like 10 times more. I bought it on sale (it’s machine made).
The same goes for many handcrafts. Have you seen the cost of one teeny skein of embroidery ribbon? And I always feel a bit sad when I see hand crocheted tablecloths or large cross stitch pieces at thrift shops for almost nothing. Someone spent hundreds of hours on that, and it’s being sold for the price of like 3 tiny skeins of floss.
- If you don't factor in the cost of my tools, I can build solid wood furniture cheaper than you can buy it. I've got a dining room cupboard and hutch in the works right now, made of walnut. I'll get it done for about $1100 all up. The same piece of furniture from Vermont Wood Studios runs about ten grand.

I work in IT (Sysadmin). "Oh, you fix computers? Can you look at my laptop?"

I've had to be very direct with my family that I don't fix computers (anymore, I used to do remote and hands on helldesk), I fix the deeper kind of stuff that keeps email working for an entire company, or makes sure new hires can log in to work stuff.
- I'm an IT manager and today I had the director of HR bring me her new iphone asking if I can help her set it up. Um, no... first, that isn't my job, and second, I have no idea how to setup an iphone. I assume it's an easy process but I've never done it before and have more pressing matters to attend to instead of fiddling with her new phone.
“I’d be glad to, which UNIX do you use on it?” generally stops that conversation from progressing.
- I wish. When I tell people I've been exclusively using Linux for more than 10 years they give me a blank look then repeat the question.

That management and leadership are smart, visionary, people without whom everything would fall apart.

It doesn't matter what my line of work is. Management is mostly out of touch idiots everywhere.

"We need to redesign the web page to be more modern! Get me a big hero image and an image carousel!"

"Customers are complaining about how they can't save their search settings. Maybe we should do something about that?"

"No that's not a priority"

I swear I spend more time prioritising and decising when to release my fixes than actually making them

AI can do it - translator.

Example of Google lens fail:

People always assume I want to turn my hobby into a job. I love to bake - it helps me de-stress from my job. If I made it my job, I wouldn't have something to help me de-stress anymore. I make enough money; I don't need to extract the joy from everything in my life for the sake of making more money.

Hussle culture is damned annoying

Work - that I do math and science and stuff all the time. Reality - I do that some times. The rest of the time is investigating why an operator put toilet paper into the gear box or other oddities. People are weird.

Hobby - that 3d printing can make anything and it's better bc it's printed. Reality - it's just another tool, does some things well, others not. 3d printed houses are, in general, stupid PR stunts.

3d printed houses are, in general, stupid PR stunts.
But the news told me they would solve the housing crisis!
Oh man, I can and do make a lot of wild things on my printer, but I can't count the number of times I've had to talk people out of this as a hobby. I've had my box for 7 years, I've completely redesigned the print head, the fan assembly, the extruders, the feed method, the bed, basically everything but the body of the printer. You are not going to drop $200 on marketplace and start printing miniatures this weekend. You are not going to replace all the hardware in your house with printed parts. You are not going to print an armory of ghost guns.
This isn't sci-fi replicators, this is at best goblin artifice.
- Idk I have a $300 printer upstairs and you totally can just print stuff on it immediately. The days of super expensive (money and/or time) printers is past.

QA tests software.
QA reports issue with software.
Developers review issue report.
"Will Not Fix", "Works As Designed", "Cannot Reproduce", "Works on my machine"

End Users: "This software is buggy, their QA must suck!"

As a developer I cherish Q/A and dread anytime they would start typing something into Teams.

"oh wow your photography is so nice what camera do you use?"

._. photography is 80% skill and 20% gear and yet, i never get asked "what technique did you use?", it's always about the camera i use, as if this entry level DSLR is framing and shooting on its own

What techniques do you use?
- oh various ones! what i pick always depends on the lighting conditions, if the subject is stationary or moving, and the vibe i want for the photo.
  i definitely prefer single thought out takes rather than rapid fire 20 photos with hope that one of them is the one (i don't shoot sports often). And overall i really like framing things with the foreground to give a feeling of depth to the photo. In post processing i focus on making the photos look like i remember them to have been, coloured by memory and all that, rather than try to recreate realism 1:1. i'm being kinda vague but my photos are mostly on my PC and i use lemmy on mobile so can't point to anything more specific, and tbf, a lot of my best takes are just patience and or luck
  above all though, i like experimenting with how i shoot or edit :)
  thanks for asking <3
I took this photo with my iPhone 12 mini:
https://metapixl.com/p/Stoy/797570781570361213
It is a fantastic photo, I use it as my current lockscreen.
This photo was taken with my Lumix S5
https://metapixl.com/p/Stoy/795407386229307789
They are two very different photos, I hesitate to rank them in terms of how good they are.
A good camera gives the photographer more tools to get the photo they want, but you still need skills and experience to take good photos.
- Damn. TIL I'm a bot and can't view either link.
._. photography is 80% skill and 20% gear and yet, i never get asked "what technique did you use?"
How do you even answer that question? "Rule of thirds :)"? It's not like you're using a technique, it's a mixture of many techniques. Do you just go into a Photography 101 lesson?
"What equipment do you use?" Has a simple, exact answer, which can open the door to more in depth conversation.
- there's a bit more to it than the rule of thirds
  there's always a leading style, technique, or idea behind the process that happens before you take the photo. and that process can be explained, to a degree

I’m a general contractor, and I think a lot of my customers assume I know everything about construction work - that whenever I’m doing something, it’s something I’ve done dozens of times before. But quite often, that’s not the case. Sometimes, all I know about the task at hand comes from a YouTube video I watched the night before, or I’m just following the manufacturer’s instructions step by step.

People don’t realize how often I’m just winging it and hoping it turns out fine. The fact that someone hires me usually means they know even less about the job than I do, which creates the illusion of much greater expertise. But in reality, the main difference between me and them often just boils down to the fact that I'm not afraid to try.

And that you have the experience of trying
- In many cases, yes - but my work also involves a lot of things that I’m doing for the very first time.

I do not actually have keys to anything, nor am I allowed to wear headphones.

(Janitor)

Why no headphones? Seems like that would make the job more enjoyable.
- ...that's why.
  /s it's a safety issue, kitchen workers aren't allowed to use them either

That I smoke all day, everyday. I don't. I read reports, I check environmental variable, I take readings from and make adjustments to tanks, I instruct people on how to prune and I sob over the new room of completely bare ones because nobody fucking listens to me.

I'm a web developer. People assume the following:

I'm an expert with operating systems.
I'm good with math.
I eat junk food and drink energy drinks/soda.
I'm a proponent and consumer of all new technologies.
I like (insert) TV, Movie, or Anime.

Hey bro, can you hack my ex GFs Facebook?
- Yeah, by social engineering. You would probably be better at that than myself though since you can get a girlfriend.
I'm knowledgeable about operating systems.
I'm good with math.
I eat junk food and drink energy drinks/soda.
I read about new techniques but am very wary of heavily marketed stuff.
I read a ton of Asian comics.
People assume that I know how to do webpages, they don't know what a web developer is. No, I don't know l. Well barely but not really, I'm a data engineer goddammit.
I assume you wear programmer socks. DM pics?
- I wear black GOLDTOE socks or leather sandals.

As a teacher: I don't get summers off.

As a waitress: Carrying food or drinks to the table is the least significant part of the job.

Both of those jobs are also significantly more difficult than most people realize.
- I don't know. I am certain I would be bad at either!
You don't? I dated the teacher across the street and she partied all summer. Yes, they stop later and start sooner than when the kids do.
- As a junior teacher, I taught summer school. The more senior teachers were doing continuing education. We all made lesson plans, prepared materials, and had mandatory professional development seminars.

Just because I am in IT doesn't mean I can hack your taxes away, and if I could, I wouldn't because I like my freedom

Oh man.. Just because I am in IT, that doesn’t mean I can get that app to work on your phone or figure out why you can’t get your alarm clock to work…
- Just because I Am in IT, that doesn't mean that I can repair your printer. And even if I could, theres no way I want to do that.

I make good money. I have a masters in sound engineering and I work in IT. I enjoy both a lot and probably that’s why I make little out of them or im just shit lol

I have a masters in an academic field, but my profession is sound engineer. I learned the trade like an apprentice, but my academic background really helps my main job as a production manager --- lots of organizing and communication to handle on the business side.
I think a common misconception of (live) sound engineers is that we're always partying, but this shit is work, especially if you find yourself on the road.

I'm a physical substation designer, and people ask me if I can do electrician stuff.

No, I can't, and don't ask me anything about electricity, thanks.

I just had to google what a substation was. My initial guess was that you made subways lol.

Your business degree does not make you an industrial engineer, you don't even fucking understand why I keep crusading against variance!

I had the reverse experience. I was in school for finance and I had a roommate that recently graduated with an engineering undergrad. They decided to do a masters in finance because they thought it would be easy. They dropped out after 1 week and said "I have no idea what they're talking about" like no shit buddy lol

I'm a game designer. Most people have a very hard time understanding what I do

What I've learned from this thread is you can fix my laptop
depending on the size of the team I could see "game designer" encompassing a large range of scopes.
- Yeah that's the first thing that can make it confusing but my specialty is core gameplay on AAA games so it usually goes something like this:
  Oh so you draw the characters? No I don't really draw, those are artists. I help make the characters move though.
  Oh so you animate them? Er not really, those are animators, I help with the logic
  Oh so you're a programmer? No, I do use scripting languages but I'm no programmer ... and so on...
  I usually end up saying something like that if you were to make a board game, you would need an artist to draw up the assets and a game designer to make up the rules and they both work together so that's basically what I do but on a larger team and in a more micro scale.

That I can fix their computer or home network.

Sorry, Bubba, if your router costs less than my PC, there's not much I can do. Same answer if your PC costs less than my car.

Also, I haven't been good at troubleshooting windows (to the extent that is at all possible) since Tobey was Spiderman.

No one knows the difference between fire eating and fire breathing. Everyone asks me for fire breathing lessons. I don't fire breathe. I also highly advise against it.

People assume that because I'm into technology that I can unlock ~~stolen~~ phones or do XYZ whatever with their Facebook/Twitter/Instagram accounts or whatever. One, I don't touch stolen devices. Two, I don't have any accounts with any of those sort of services, and ain't about to start one to learn the ins and outs for other people.

I work with embedded programming. I am not the first person you should ask to make a website for you...

Can you make me a website that runs on my microwave?
- Is the microwave the server or is it the UI?

I'm an antenna engineer and anyone who vaguely knows what that means asks if I'm a ham radio operator. Nope.

Someone glimpses Dark Theme enabled Outlook with custom rules to auto sort email and suddenly you're Neo and can undo longstanding problems caused by nepo IT hires even though you're a plant operator like them with the same user privileges.