What's an innocent misconception about your hobby/profession that drives you up the wall?
Like for example, how someone thinks because you work in IT you can fix their TV, or how if you're into music you must be able to play any random instrument.
I just like hearing pros rant about about their very niche problems.
I am a Windows and Cloud administrator. As soon as people hear cloud and computers, they start thinking that I am personally involved with building the metaverse and could work for NASA. Meanwhile, all the people on the technical sites and subreddits inflame my imposter syndrome every day.
Every time someone learns that I build PCs as a hobby, they almost all ask me about things relating to electrical engineering. Look, socketing a CPU isn’t rocket science. And no, I can’t fix your computer.
Speak for yourself... I trashed a CPU by socketing it in the wrong way around... I’m super lucky that Intel happily replaced it instead of saying “Nope, you destroyed it, you dumbass”
More than 20 years ago we had an intern who was tasked with putting CPUs and RAM on motherboards, which were sold as 'tuning kits' for older PCs. He was left on his own for nearly the whole day, because the guy who was in charge was out for the rest of the day. The next day the when he was back the intern came in and was kicked out immediately, because on all of the ~100-200 kits he built that day the CPU was inserted the wrong way around.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but when you say "build PCs as a hobby", what does this mean exactly? How many PCs do you build on a regular basis? And what do you do with them once you are finished? I am genuinely curious. Most people I know just build their PC and maybe replace a couple of parts over the years and then build a new one once it's out of date. Thanks in advance!
you sell them to "gamers" and let them go broke. a neatly packaged custom rig can recover the cost, at the very least, if not make a tidy profit. Or you make a youtube channel about it.
alternatively, you buy one or two components here or there as they get outdated and swap them them out. Or you do what I did for my first Beowulf Custer... raid Dad's "computer parts shelf" (he's a unix admin... pretty sure having decade's old spare parts on a shelf is mandatory for the profession.)
Whenever people find out I have a math degree, they tell me how bad they are at math. They seem almost proud about it. Nobody ever brags about being bad at English. They also assume I’m really good at arithmetic or counting, a la Rain Man or something. I am not.
I think my frustration is more that people think math is something you are good at or not, rather than a skill that can be honed. Math is generally taught in the US as a series of steps to memorize with little conceptual understanding or purpose behind it. It’s a shame.
Everything is taught in the US as a bunch of stuff to memorize and then immediately forget when the test is over, rather than teaching people to understand/process things in a meaningful way
I get the same. Writing up my thesis currently and people definitely ask me about my research just to be nice.
I start out by saying how on a clock, if you add 12 hours to the time then, ignoring the AM/PM part, you get the same time out. So you’re essentially adding a rule to the arithmetic of the clock that adding 12 is identical to adding 0.
I then say I work with number systems that have some manner of clock rule to them. I like to see how we can build up big examples of spaces with this logic from some smallest building bricks.
I think that’s just about the most coherent way of describing my research area. I just get blank stares and “it’s all Greek to me.”
There are tons of misconceptions about mathematics, but the biggest and most baffling one is: that no new mathematics is being created, that the field is "done".
The opposite is true: there are more open problems than ever, and research is frantic in mathematics with hundreds of thousands of serious new theorems being proven every year by professional mathematicians, and entirely new mathematical vistas being discovered every few years.
In fact, the pace of research is so fast that we are now creating the foundations for databases of mathematical theories and their proofs in order to better classify and preserve them.
People who play tabletop role-playing games have no social skills. Dude, we sit around and talk with real people for literally hours on end - that is literally what the game is!
Also that Dungeons And Dragons is the only role play game. There are hundreds if not thousands with different themes, focuses, setting, systems and whatever else. DnD is good for high action high fantasy, and if that's your bag that's cool, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want a renaissance coutly intrigue it is really not!
Hell yeah dude. I've been through heart-wrenching loss and triumphant joys that technically never happened. Yet there's a group of us that experienced it together and are now emotionally richer for it. It's an almost purely social experience that teaches us how to deal with other humans and explore scenarios that the average person would never touch.
D&D and TTRPGs in general should be considered more often when talking about the development of social skills. I've learned a ton about clear and effective communication, how to converse with people I would normally never talk to, and how to be considerate of the feelings/opinions of others while not losing sight of my own.
Absolutely. Every emotion in a safe environment. I know a few autistic people who play, and one once said something along the lines of it being a social interaction where you can sit down and read the files first!
Yup. It's fun. The game I was in was short lived but entertaining. It uses the regular CoC system with a few adjustments (e.g. experience comes in the form of training courses) so if you know that it'd be easy to pick up, and if you don't... well it'll still be easy to pick up, tbh
Also that Dungeons And Dragons is the only role play game.
Oh man I could go on about this. I almost exclusively run Savage Worlds, and it straight up doesn't get enough love for how versatile it is vs. cramming a fistful of homebrewed rules into D&D.
I've not had a lot of experience with Savage Worlds, I'd like to play it more tbh. I've only played at starting character level in a couple of one-shots so I've not had a good exposure to it
Wish I could find someone with your mindset locally. Just moved to a new city and it’s been easy to find DND campaigns advertised, incredibly hard to find anything else.
It's a problem. But it happened before when 3rd Ed was released, and wotc have just upset a lot of creators wuth their ogl shenanigans, so I am confident things will change. In the mean time, keep looking, play dnd, and/or run a game yourself.
For a while, I was a burlesque dancer as a fun little side gig. In my daytime life, I'm an accountant.
One day I was talking to someone on a non-work related Slack. I told them I'm an accountant and they asked me where they could find my OnlyFans page. That's the day I learned a lot of SWs tell people that they are accountants. This misconception happens all the time now. I've started saying "I'm an accountant. That's not code for anything. I really am just a regular accountant."
SWs wouldn't need to do this if we treated them better. I get why the community chose accountant as a faux title. It has made me talking about my work very awkward and creepy.
I assume the general accountant workload is both too boring and too confidential to really talk about.. So even though the SW knows next to nothing about accounting, it doesn't matter because almost nobody will ask any follow up questions.
Having known plenty of accountants, my guess is that the job generally pays well and is thoroughly disinteresting. I've never heard a work-related story from an accountant. I've heard about the clients being difficult, the co-workers being terrible or terrific, but never really a story about the work itself.
That probably translates really well to sex work. You can tell stories about clients or co-workers and, devoid of context, it maps cleanly into accounting.
A work related problem in accounting would be really hard to tell to someone not in accounting, since it's so technical. (e.g. Damnit, my cash flows didn't balance because the tax manager shoved in a prior year tax adjustment in the AOCI!!!)
That's why it's common for accountants to marry other accountants - so they can actually share with each other.
I'm a health and social care assistant, mainly I take care of the elderly. Many seem to think the job is 'just wiping backsides', when it's a lot more. It's a job that requires broad knowledge of the body, illnesses and hygiene. It's a thankless job, but one I'm proud of doing.
Without knowing what you’re getting paid, I can tell you it’s not enough. Taking care of the elderly is no joke, and a career that should be held to a higher level of respect. I’m just a caregiver for one man in his 90’s and I’m exhausted at the end of each day.
I am a school psychologist with a master's in clinical psychology. The main misconception for my work is that (at least in my state) school psychologists rarely focus on counseling. Instead, we are writing reports and determining whether a student is eligible or maintains eligibility for special education. I give IQ, academic, and social-emotional tests and write a report. I work with a student for about 3 hours maximum and then I'm alone writing and scheduling meetings. Then, I'm onto the next one.
Most people, even staff in the school, think I am a counselor. I can technically do it, but there already is someone who was hired for that position... so, they should probably do that, and I'll make sure our special education documents are compliant.
I'm an English professor, and I get a lot of "Oh, I'll have to make sure to use good grammar around you." First, I have better manners than to go around correcting other people.* Second, I know enough about the development of the language to realize how fluid and often artificial the "rules" are.
Unless you're trying to mansplain something to me. Then all bets are off.
I’m a lawyer. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard “oh you’re a lawyer? You must have been good at arguing when you were a kid”…or that I must be “good at public speaking”.
It’s funny cause I do commercial real estate contracts and business law…I don’t ever go to court. Most of my day is spent staring at a computer and trying to figure out the best way to change three or four words in an obscure contract provision to best protect my client’s monetary interests. I don’t really ever argue in a professional setting, but I have learned how to think differently, how to see things from various perspectives and anticipate all sides of a negotiation and how I’d best respond.
I also can’t stand all the constant “hey can I ask you a legal question” from friends and family. Or friends and family sending me random contracts and asking me to “look it over for them”. It’s like they assume that just because they know me, I can do that for free, when I spend 10-12 hours a day billing large commercial clients for that same type of work.
That leads me to my next pet peeve: people in my life assuming that my “office job” is a simple nine to five. No. I represent clients all over the world so sometimes I am up at 4:30am to get on an international call at 5:00an. Sometimes I’m working late into the night to finalize a big land purchase contract or commercial office lease; sometimes doing that after putting in a full 9 hours at the office. I don’t get paid time off; I can work at my own pace, sure, and take “days off” here and there, but the work and business and the need for legal advice is constant and I have to catch up somehow, sometime whenever I take “time off”.
I know I’m in a privileged position so I feel kind of shitty about complaining about this, but it gets pretty old. I also recognize that I definitely need to figure out a better way to improve my work/life balance…because this won’t be super sustainable for much longer.
About the privileged position thing... I'm a blue collar worker with a massive chip on my shoulder, but the only people I complain about being privileged is people with do-nothing jobs, and people who work from home. When I think lawyer or doctor, I think ridiculous hours and lots of work.
Yeah but you can also do laundry, walk the dog, run to the store. You're not on a factory assembly line, there's downtime. And downtime at home is massively different than downtime at work. That's privileged.
Dude, lawyer is literally one of the,"My kid is a big success" jobs. It's privileged because it requires a ton of work and study before you're even allowed to do it. Not to mention the insane amount of work the job itself is.
Recreational scuba instructor since 2008. People think it's extreme as fuck, and badass and all. It's honestly really Zen. You take long, slow, deep breaths; often wearing a wetsuit or drysuit which reduces the sensory input on the body; you can't talk to anyone else (unless you have a full face mask and comms system/are fluent in sign language); mechanics of sound through water mean that everything is muffled and sounds like it's above you; you're (ideally) neutrally buoyant, so you're drifting through your surroundings.
It made a hell of a lot of sense why this was my career choice when I got an autism diagnosis in 2019.
it sounds nice but being in instructor must be hard. i remember when my mom tried to learn diving and it ended near terribly. thankfully she was with a reputable company who made sure her dive belt was right before they set off. on the descent on her first dive she got lost and instead of surfacing like she should have she just kept going til she was hoisted by the dive belt. according to her and my sister the dive instructor looked like he was going to be sick, understandably so.
That's really fascinating especially because I was in the former group and didn't really think about those aspects of diving. Would love to hear more of your stories/experiences diving - that sounds amazing to me.
I'm at an advanced level of knitting and crochet. I wear a lot of the things I knit to work and I decorate my office with my crochet.
Almost every single person I met has uttered to me, "This is so good! You should sell these." They assume that 1) I would ever do this for a profit motive and 2) that anyone would even buy my work at the price point I establish.
I just recently finished a sweater vest (link in my profile) that used 8 yarns. The cost of just materials was close to $350. And then I also time my projects, which for torso pieces for me are never fewer than 100 hours. The sweater vest ended up being just shy of 184 hours. So once you consider the cost of labor and expertise, this sweater vest is worth over $2,700 at even minimum wage for the area I live in.
There's absolutely no way I would consider selling my work!
One time I was showing off a cardigan I was done with but wanting to add pockets to, and these teenagers in the knitting group I was in asked if this was for me or for a gift. I jokingly used a snide affect and told them, "Um, haha, no. This is for me. I don't love anybody this much." 😂
And there is a widespread assumption that these tales were told to and for kids, while they were really entertainment for all ages (and some are downright X-rated).
I blame Disney... and the Brothers Grimm, who did their own part to "censor" folk tales.
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