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
“Shopkeeper” would be a pretty damn good job title too compared to retail.
‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.
I don’t think the people in the 1700s would care
Working in a shop is a skill as old as civilization.
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.
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. 😊
I manage computer systems.
- What’s a computer? It’s a fancy calculator that can make moving paintings very quickly
- What’s a calculator? A fancy automatic loom that can do math like an abacus
Congrats, you’re 12% there.
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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.
Not sure if the concept of “settings” would be something they can relate to.
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.
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?”
Most likely yes, the organisation I work for would have been 200 years old at that stage.
I’m a postie.
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 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
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.
My official work title is “Site Reliability Engineer”, which means I’m somewhere between a clerk, a tinkerer, and a millwright.
But I’m not recording any transactions by hand and the mills I work on don’t have anything to do with grain. Instead, they’re simple but very fast arithmetical machines that the moneychangers had built to account for every penny that moves from one bank to another.
Sometimes the machines don’t work as they are expected to, and it’s my job to catch this misbehavior and identify the cause so that one of the arithmetical millwrights can figure out how to fix it. I also help them them do the fixing and testing to make sure the equiment runs true before we set it back to work.
I’m a chemist, so I’d just tell them that I’m an alchemist.
Ooh, good idea. I’m an alprogrammer. Or is it alware algineer?
So close, yet so very wrong.
Apothecary might be better.
To be honest you might get away with moving the term chemistry forward a couple of decades
Beginning around 1720, a rigid distinction began to be drawn for the first time between “alchemy” and “chemistry”.[104][105] By the 1740s, “alchemy” was now restricted to the realm of gold making, leading to the popular belief that alchemists were charlatans, and the tradition itself nothing more than a fraud.[102][105]
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.
I am paid to perform other duties as assigned.
i’m teaching silicon rocks how to think
Farmer. I operate big metal things that weigh as much as your village that sucks down every plant over an area the size of Lichtenstein, then produces enough grain to feed 1700s England for a decade.
