Professionals, how have ignorant idiots misinterpreted or minimized your job?

My wife described my job to me as, tuteling around on the computer all day. I'm the sole

database administrator for my entire company. Oh boy, every conversation I have when people

ask what I do. I say, I'm the system administrator for a university, and inevitably they answer, so you fix computers. Sure. At school, my niece told her class that her dad plays golf and drinks beer for a job. He's a doctor that left the medical field to work and consulting.

My ex of five years described my job as, all you do all day is go diving. Um, oil rigs don't

build themselves and making a dive to 200 feet to install a pipeline is no small task. Nor is doing mid-water work on installing anodes on

a caisson, but she never complained about the money I made. I heard about an incident a couple of

weeks ago in the North Sea where a guy got cut off from umbilical for 45 minutes. He hugged the

pipeline and passed out on an eight-minute oxygen supply. They managed to revive him after that. Your job is

terrifying. Respect. My best friend called me a pipetting slave monkey. I'm a genetics PhD. She is

absolutely right, though. Many people think I'm only a kind of butcher, killing animals all day and extracting their brains.

I do pre-clinical research in the field of Alzheimer's disease.

Every time I tell someone what I do, they respond with,

Oh, you're the guy that parks the plane! I'm an air traffic controller, tower control.

Dressing up like a working girl. I dress up as Disney princesses and fairies with other girls,

and I visit children's birthday parties and mostly terminally ill children. I think if people use

this particular criticism, it raises a lot more questions about

their free time and bedroom lives than it does about your job.

What are they paying people to do in their own time?

I got told the only reason I wanted to be a theatre techie was so that I wouldn't have

to get up early in the morning.

I really wanted to call and wake that person up at 6.30 in the morning

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