No, I’d just tell them I’m a wizard.
Ok, do something then
Takes out their smartphone and starts the beer drinking app.
We have these things that are like stained glass books and I make how the glass looks.
Front-end developer.
Well, my job showed up around then. So they would know the term Millwright, but the modernisation would probably make them a little incredulous.
i sell gold & silver so ye
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’m a lot like a guard. But, it’s now much easier and more profitable for the criminals to steal or hold for ransom information. So, instead of guarding a warehouse or office, I guard that information.
Ooh, I like this. They’d totally get that.
I’m a “blacksmith” using advanced machinery to aid in the process.
They had pretty good clocks already, so maybe you could describe it in those terms.
In my time, we’ve covered much of the world in a mesh of fine glass wires. We shine light through them to communicate over long distances. I edit the texts in the light emitting boxes to tell the light where to go.
I’m also largely responsible for cleaning up other people’s messes, like the day shift techs who generate shitty MOPs with a shitty tool that they don’t know is doing stuff wrong because they’ve never actually run a command in a Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel, Overture, etc. in their life and now I’m just ranting and rambling…
I wait tables, so, yeah.
Ah, a bar wench!
LOL c’mon
I (a software engineer) am a high magician who fixes the spells other high magicians put into the magic box ages ago because the king wants them to do something other than whay they were originally designed to do.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
Even better: “our clocks in the future are very complex and it’s my job to keep them working”.
Not sure if the concept of “settings” would be something they can relate to.
I was wondering about that too. I think they had adjustable tools in common use, but I could be wrong. They might have also used a different word when changing the depth “setting” of their horse-drawn plow, although “to set” has got to be a pretty old verb.
That’s the point they burn you at the stake for being a witch.
Well, if they weigh the same as a duck
Folks in 1700 understood what an engineer was. I’d just tell them I design really complicated looms.
Can you get it to draw bewbs? Asking for a friend
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.
I get peanuts in return while the king keep most of the loot.
Well, at least this part hasn’t changed.
Ah, so you’re the
grand viziercourt jester.That definitely define my everyday job experience.
The project manager is your peer, not your king.
It all depends on the project and the team. On some, you work with and along the PM and all is good, and other times you get dictated unconnected requests that you need to fight or ignore.
Thankfully I’ve only ever worked in the first environment.
Lucky, my first 2 dev jobs had PMs that were right out of college business majors with zero web development experience. They were just direct unfiltered conduits between the clients and devs, but with a layer of telephone game and almost no ability to day no to the clients.
It was a fucking nightmare. By the time I did get a good PM, I was pretty much burned out and started my own consultancy (since I’d been managing a small team and doing both dev and PM’s job by then anyway).
Bob: “why can’t the king just ask the peasants directly?”
I’M A PEOPLE PERSON!!!
I’M A PEASANT PERSON, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU NOBLES, WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT
I’m a programmer. I think I would explain it as creating and operating mechanical contraptions that help students find books to read and help them write new works and send them to professors. I work at a university and that is basically what our program does.
So basically we have these extremely powerful but terribly stupid machines that can basically do anything as long as you know how to talk to them and tell them exactly how to do what you want them to do. I’m that guy who talks to these machines and make them do what people want.
I tell my users it’s magic. My job is to be a wizard. When I write new programs it’s coming up with a new spell.
I make the horse poop sound great coming out? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Here, you lost something: \
Bizzare it’s there on my end. Glitch in the Matrix?
No, that’s an escape character. You have to double up on it for it to show up.
To be doubly clear, if you want to use a special character literally instead of figuratively, you can add a \. That’s an escape character. This includes \ itself, which if you look at the source on this comment you can see I’m typing twice.
Another example: *not italicised*, which I write \*not italicised\*, so it doesn’t just come out not italicised.
Mine’s pretty easy- I’m a bard!
Username does NOT check out.
Unless you multiclass
Lmao good point, not an effective sounding multi class but sounds fun as hell
The only question I’d have for a druid / bard is, “You holding?”
