User end hands on IT for the elderly.
that it’s hard. “Oh I could never do your job”
It’s literally a customer service job with tech paint. Reboot the device. Don’t yell at the decrepit person doing their best in a digital world. Collect check and praise.
The amount of times I’ve been called a genius for relogging into someone’s email is greater than 7.
Yeah. Real hard.
Lol, I was the computer genius in my office job because I knew how to change the paper size on the printer from Letter to A4. Soak up the praise!
People are always amazed at how physically active embroidery is at an industrial scale. Everybody thinks it’s just sitting around with an oldschool hoop, but I’m up and down the length of an 8ft machine all day, embroidering the same design on 6 garments at once.
I think the most I ever did was 300 garments in an 8 hour workday, but I put 17k steps on my fitbit and was dead tired afterwards.
Edit:oh heck it was more steps than that
I’m working with computers => I can fix their windows problems.
Nope. If I work on windows, and it eats itself for no reason, I call IT. I don’t waste my time on that crap software.
People praise me up for “saving the bees”. Honey bees don’t need saving. It’s the other bees that do, the hundreds of species of bumblebees, mining bees, solitary bees etc etc. Bees that are outcompeted in some areas due to the number of hobbyist beekeepers and commercial bee farms. I’m one of the baddies.
I have red-belted bumblebees living inside the wall of my house. We need to fix the broken light fixture they’re using to gain access, but I dun wanna kick them out, haha.
I’ve always been interested in the business side of beekeeping, do you rent out for pollination and is it worth doing?
That I spend all day coding, I spend most my day reading. Code usually but still
That’s so fucking true. If I’m honest its usually trying to figure out how the fuck something actually is supposed to work. Its either by searching stuff online or changing single lines of code until it finally works.
I’m in engineering. If I tell someone I work for the phone company they think I work on phones. Not sure what my mom thinks I do.
I’m in school for electrical engineering. Everyone I tell that to then says they are going to hire me to fix the electrical issues at their house.
Software dev and game dev: Being lazy, it not being a real job, not much effort, it being easy, everyone is a super genius, AI will replace us
Work - that I do math and science and stuff all the time. Reality - I do that some times. The rest of the time is investigating why an operator put toilet paper into the gear box or other oddities. People are weird.
Hobby - that 3d printing can make anything and it’s better bc it’s printed. Reality - it’s just another tool, does some things well, others not. 3d printed houses are, in general, stupid PR stunts.
Oh man, I can and do make a lot of wild things on my printer, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to talk people out of this as a hobby. I’ve had my box for 7 years, I’ve completely redesigned the print head, the fan assembly, the extruders, the feed method, the bed, basically everything but the body of the printer. You are not going to drop $200 on marketplace and start printing miniatures this weekend. You are not going to replace all the hardware in your house with printed parts. You are not going to print an armory of ghost guns.
This isn’t sci-fi replicators, this is at best goblin artifice.
Idk I have a $300 printer upstairs and you totally can just print stuff on it immediately. The days of super expensive (money and/or time) printers is past.
Oh yeah, you can get printing immediately, even make some really good stuff, but I’m taking about the people who think they can pick up some bunk diy thing and bag of pla and get professional resin detail on their first go.
Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be a little rough around the edges. I don’t really mind layer lines, but if you want a perfect product you’re going to have to put in some design work to get it to that level and have a good printer for it.
I actually love layer lines, it’s such a distinctive look and feel that few other things have. I keep a second profile for my printer that prints at 0.4/0.2 just for that feel.
AI can do it - translator.
Example of Google lens fail:
Therapists are not “always analysing” you.
Seriously, you gotta pay me before I’ll spend the energy to do that
- unless they are autistic. Then they analyse every little twitch
I make good money. I have a masters in sound engineering and I work in IT. I enjoy both a lot and probably that’s why I make little out of them or im just shit lol
I have a masters in an academic field, but my profession is sound engineer. I learned the trade like an apprentice, but my academic background really helps my main job as a production manager — lots of organizing and communication to handle on the business side.
I think a common misconception of (live) sound engineers is that we’re always partying, but this shit is work, especially if you find yourself on the road.
Just because I am in IT doesn’t mean I can hack your taxes away, and if I could, I wouldn’t because I like my freedom
Oh man… Just because I am in IT, that doesn’t mean I can get that app to work on your phone or figure out why you can’t get your alarm clock to work…
Just because I Am in IT, that doesn’t mean that I can repair your printer. And even if I could, theres no way I want to do that.
That I can make the band suck less. Sure, there’s something to be said about polishing a shit… But ultimately, it’s shit in>shit out. Your guitar doesn’t sound like ass because of the EQ; it sounds like ass because the guitarist had nine beers before he even walked on stage, and he can’t stay on beat to save his goddamned life.
Psychoacoustics is a fascinating subject. Just like placebo, people will fool themselves into thinking that something sounds good or bad, simply because they want it to. I always keep a DFA fader on my console, for when random people walk up and have suggestions. I make an adjustment to the DFA fader, they smile and nod to themselves, and then walk away. DFA means “Does Fuck All”. It’s literally a fader that isn’t doing anything at all. It’s not in the mix, it’s not in the monitors. It’s just a spare fader. But by adjusting the DFA, audience members will feel like I took them seriously, and they’ll placebo themselves into thinking that I took their advice.
To be clear, not all audience advice is bad advice. But for every “it’s too loud” complaint, you’ll inevitably get an equal and opposite “it’s too quiet”. There’s a reason music festivals have their audio console fenced off with a very wide perimeter. It’s specifically so drunken audience members can’t just saunter up and start yelling suggestions. That shit is distracting and 99% of the time is entirely unproductive.
There is one instance where I have heard of a literal Suck Button. Gonna copy and paste it here…
Not my story, but I like to read it again from time to time and get a good chuckle:
My band’s drummer, John, is also a sound guy; for several years before we hooked up musically, he had been doing sound for other bands I was in, as well as for touring acts I booked shows for. He’s very good at what he does, and has a pretty massive rig. Anyway, he’s the nicest guy in the world at band practice, at Burger King, or at a gig we’re playing, but when he’s running sound for other bands, he can be pretty crabby.
Very little patience for bands who start late or end late. Even less patience for bands who take an encore when they’re the second band playing out of five. Very little patience for singers who ask for more vocals in the monitor while cupping the microphone ball in both hands (feedback, anyone?) In general, just an altogether grouchy sound man.
For example, he ran sound once for this seven- or eight piece ska band. One of the trombone players said he needed two mics: one for his horn and one for his backup vocals. Normally at this venue (a 120-seater), John didn’t bother to mic horns at all. Rolling his eyes, John put up a Shure Beta 58 and some AKG condenser mic. “This Shure is for your vocals, and this AKG is for your horn, OK?” he said. “Don’t blow your horn into the vocal mic, because your horn is about 30db louder than your voice and I’m going to have everything mixed properly.” Horn player nods his head. During the second song of the set, apparently this trombonist was set to get a solo. Right before his solo starts, he grabs both mics and pushes them close together, so that the capsules are actually touching. He then blows this fortissimo opening note into BOTH mics. I was sitting at a table in back, by the sound board, at the time. John’s limiters caught most of it, and I STILL had ringing in my ears for two days. At the end of the song, John mutes both of the guy’s mics (and leaves them mute), and basically threatens to ream out the guy’s plumbing with his own horn if he ever pulls that shit again. John does this through his talkback mic, which is clearly audible over the monitors. The crowd bursts into laughter, and the horn player goes bright red in the face.
At any rate, for years I had heard John threaten bands with the “suck button.” Bands who were taking too long to set up, or whose members repeatedly refused to follow reasonable directions (please keep that vocal mic away from the monitors!), would be threatened. “Pull that shit again, and I’m gonna hit the suck button on you guys!” I took it to mean that he would intentionally make them sound bad, but he never followed through on the threat, so I took it as a vague general warning.
So anyway, a little while back he’s running sound on a four band show. The second band, a Matchbox 20/Train kind of band, has him running 20 minutes behind before they even play a note because their lead guitarist was late. Their allotted set time is 40 minutes, but their last song runs over and by the time it’s done, they’ve played for almost 45 minutes. John says quietly over the talkback mic, “Hey guys, you’re done.” The lead singer says loudly over the vocal mic “Sound man says we gotta get off the stage. We got one more song for you!” as they kick into another soupy jangle-rock tune. John shakes his head at me. Then, the most amazing thing happened. After their “encore,” this band kicks straight into ANOTHER song without announcing it, apparently in the hope that John wouldn’t notice it was a different song.
John leans over to me to be heard over the PA and asks, “Hey, wanna see the suck button?” “Sure,” I replied. I figured he was going to muck with the levels or just turn them off or something. Instead, he reaches to one of his racks and starts scrolling through patches on his trusty DigiTech unit. Sure enough, he gets to a patch titled SUCK BUTTON. He engages it, and all hell breaks loose onstage. The lead singer and the lead guitarist (who was singing backup), immediately start to sing WAY off key. They try to get back in tune, fail, trail off in mid-line, try again, and start glaring at each other. The guitarist is so distracted by this that he starts muffing the chord progression. If not for the drummer, I think the whole song would have derailed. For the entire four minute duration of the song, I was treated to this asshole band sounding like crap and getting madder and madder at each other. John explained the patch to me; basically it pitch shifts all tracks from the vocal submix up one step, BUT ONLY IN THE MONITORS. So the audience, out in front of the mains, was treated to the sound of two guys trying to get in tune, only to be utterly confused. If they got it sounding right in the monitors, they could tell that something was grossly wrong in the mains. And each of the singers thought it was the other guy who was singing out of tune. I just about died laughing.
At my home venue, I have no protection. If you fuck with me—particularly within the first twoish songs of a set—my usual response is to look them dead in the eye and say, “Where do you work? I’m going to come to your job and help you on Monday.” And that usually scares them off.
Sometimes, I feel bad about it and will find and apologize to that person later, explaining why I reacted like that.
My favorite is when it’s a local/college-age band and parents are around. Or spouses of older band members. “No, I can’t get her vocal any louder because she’s whispering six inches from the microphone and Jimi Hendrix up there is blasting his amp at 11.”
All this said, it’s a common misconception that “asshole” is the default mode of operation for a sound engineer. It’s just that the job is fucking stressful, and if you catch us at the height of that stress, we will react poorly. I’ve definitely come across a few grumps, but most folks are nice on average — kinda have to be so that people will want to work with you. Most of us just want to work with the team to make a good show happen.
To your original point, it’s 100% true that the better the artist, the better/easier the mix. Can only polish a turd so much before it crumbles.
My favorite is when it’s a local/college-age band and parents are around. Or spouses of older band members. “No, I can’t get her vocal any louder because she’s whispering six inches from the microphone and Jimi Hendrix up there is blasting his amp at 11.”
There’s a reason the lead singer’s girlfriend is the butt of so many jokes. And I have 100% had to use the Baffle of Shame for guitarists who won’t turn down. It’s just a doghouse made out of pink foam board and tape, that you can throw over the top of problem amps. Add a corner notch for cables to run in/out, and dust it in some black paint.
If it’s a tube amp, I can at least understand it; Tubes distort at higher volumes, and the distortion is part of the tone. And if you try to argue with a guitarist about their tone, you’ll lose every time. The nice once will smile and nod, then not make any changes when you ask them to turn down. The rude ones will make direct eye contact as they turn it up more.
But if it’s a solid state amp, putting a 2x4 block under it (or putting it on a spare guitar stand) to tip it towards their head usually works. The guitarist is used to having all of the sound blow right past their knees, so actually aiming it at their head makes a world of difference.
When I worked in retail, I’d have customers ask me to raise or lower the temperature in the store I worked at. “Of course!” I’d say and then disappear into the back area and play on my phone for a couple of minutes. I’d come back out and ask if it was starting to feel better, to which they’d reply, “I feel it working already, thank you!”
That management and leadership are smart, visionary, people without whom everything would fall apart.
It doesn’t matter what my line of work is. Management is mostly out of touch idiots everywhere.
“We need to redesign the web page to be more modern! Get me a big hero image and an image carousel!”
“Customers are complaining about how they can’t save their search settings. Maybe we should do something about that?”
“No that’s not a priority”
I swear I spend more time prioritising and decising when to release my fixes than actually making them
Your business degree does not make you an industrial engineer, you don’t even fucking understand why I keep crusading against variance!
I had the reverse experience. I was in school for finance and I had a roommate that recently graduated with an engineering undergrad. They decided to do a masters in finance because they thought it would be easy. They dropped out after 1 week and said “I have no idea what they’re talking about” like no shit buddy lol
