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people I know just build their PC and maybe replace a couple of parts over the years and then build a new one once it's out of date.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alternatively, you buy one or two components here or there as they get outdated and swap them them out.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.)
When I was an active in a band, "You should play our _________ (usually a very busy bar or restaurant), we can't pay you, but it'll be great exposure."
I have been a machinist/model maker for 10 years now.
No, I can't just take your .prt/.iges/.stl/.stp file and "load it into the machine and press the green button".
I use that quote because it was said to me by a particularly arrogant engineering intern. Machining is a complex trade that is made to seem simple because of software and modern automation. While that is fantastic for my profession, it brings with it this idea that I'm not really doing all that much work. Reality is that I'm constantly applying my knowledge of the trade and the things I do might be subtle to the onlookers, but there was a lesson learned before now that took me hours or days to overcome. I train a lot of our machining interns now who are mostly folks in the 20-25 years old range and every single on of them so far as had that humbling moment of "Oh I learned about this in the classroom and did it on the simulator, I know exactly what I'm doing" only to fail. Its a great line of work that is very satisfying for a lot of reasons but it does grind my gears when its portrayed as being unskilled or easy.
So... I built my first 3d printer in the 90's- I get exactly what you're saying. I'm always amazed at the .stls people bringing me thinking it's just a button.
and I'm not dumb enough to compare what I do to what you do. entirely different levels, there.
I think a lot of people would benefit from learning on manual machines. I had this misconception in my early twenties, but watching (and then using) manual machines was really helpful.
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.”
For romhacking: that because I know how to romhack that I'd automatically just be willing to "do a quick hack for them" that actually is just stupidly hard and complicated to pull off (like a multiplayer hack for a single player game).
I work in tech support for a credit card processor (it’s even more boring than it sounds). Yes I’ve got some general nerd knowledge and know some other random stuff, but I can only guarantee I can (probably) fix a credit card machine my employer makes.
Your Windows machine crashed? Better use google. That’s what I’d be doing if I tried to fix it.
I’m an oncologist. When online, it drives me mad and almost personally offended (at least to the extent a hardened former Twitter and Reddit user can be offended!) when I come across variants of the old ”cancer care does more harm than good” trope. If so, I’d have quit my job and chosen a way more lucrative specialty. Interestingly, I almost never encounter that type of argument in real life, only by random people on the internet.
Instead, people IRL seem rather convinced that we wade in pain, sorrow and grief all day. Sometimes, that results in me holding a speech about how much I get back from my patients, the joy of curing someone from metastatic melanoma, or how I somehow end up having a good laugh with someone almost every day at work. I usually can’t summon that kind of patience, though.
When I was an active in a band, "You should play our _________ (usually a very busy bar or restaurant), we can't pay you, but it'll be great exposure."
I'm an Air Traffic Controller and people always 'joke' (or really don't know) I wave the batons at planes to get them to the gate. No I don't and I'm not in the tower either (while that is a good guess).
People saying it must be so stressful. Well yes, it sometimes is. But so is every job. And we're trained to handle it.
People blaming us for not keeping an eye on cities or nature while controlling planes. We have procedures which take that into account and we are hired to be as efficient as possible. If the rules allowed it, we're doing it.
People saying pilots fly the plane and we do nothing. Yeah pilots fly the plane, but look at all the dumb idiots on the road when giving way or getting in one lane/queue. You really think the sky would go any better when they can't even see eachother?
Not infuriating but intriguing, when I worked in safety car crashes a lot of people asked me if I was inside the car during the crashes... Never thought that would be the first thing coming up to mind to people but it did happen a lot.
The idea that depressed people don't have enough serotonin, or that there's such a thing as a 'chemical imbalance' that needs to be corrected by--you guessed it--big pharma's stupid drugs.
Add comment