Asklemmy

I'm a glorified locksmith for magic wiz boxes. Technically I do other things as well, but mostly it's just getting past the locks that people have lost the key for.

There are also magical entities that take works from the nether realm and bring them into existence here, only they are all powered by grumpy demons and so I don't deal with those.

I make a long list of things for people to do in order to create a final outcome, and then keep track of the progress and find solutions for deviations.

Project manager.

They never really called it that, but I'm pretty sure the concept isn't new. Architects and the likes did pretty much the same when building ginormous structures back in ancient Rome and Egypt, so they'd get the idea. Probably wouldn't understand the project deliverable, but at least the process.

We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician's documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.

I'm just going to call myself an artist of new media types and end it there.

I'm an artist, so probably. I do traditional painting, something they'd get immediately, but my digital stuff would be difficult to explain. They'd probably think my subject matter is weird, but they'd certainly be able to identify my work as art.

Imagine an abacus. Now imagine that abacus to be very large, as large as the side of a building, with hundreds of rows, each row with 256 possible arrangements.

Now imagine making different arrangements of the rows in that abacus, such that they are directions on how to change the arrangements of other rows in that same abacus. Further, suppose that this abacus can follow a series of these directions itself, without a person needing to do it.

What I do is to write a series of these instructions in order to accomplish specific tasks on the rest of the abacus. Adding numbers together, search through rows to find specific numbers, copying them. Numbers might represent points on a map, accounts in a business, words in a book, even colors in a picture, like you might find in a tapestry.

But then imagine this abacus is the size of a whole city - that's the number of rows it has. But its elements are so small that the whole of it can fit in your pocket. And it uses the same energy to accomplish its tasks that is found in a bolt of lightning, but in very small amounts.

Well, my job showed up around then. So they would know the term Millwright, but the modernisation would probably make them a little incredulous.

My job is to digitize cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and other magnetic media.

So first I'd have to explain the miracle of how we managed to capture moving images and sounds onto these thin strips of plastic covered in rust. I'd follow that up by explaining how that technology is now considered quaint and out of date, and that these days we just get a thinking machine to remember that sort of thing for us.

If anyone has any idea on how to explain generative AI to someone from the 1700s, let me know. Maybe we can try explain my job then.

I solve problems related to how lightning rocks talk to each other. Often there's an issue with how automatic scribes decide they don't feel like talking. Some days I must travel more than double the speed of your fastest horse using a metal box with wheels. I will often complain when my metal box picks the wrong music to play.

I (a software engineer) sit at a table and pound my fingers against an object for many hours a day. That’s it.

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.

I think so? Libraries certainly existed, so there's that. Workshops existed, even if they were less industrialized/more artisanal. The only novelty might be that the two should be in the same place.

Then again, libraries of old apparently were used for a lot more than just books/scrolls, and trade guilds must have needed written materials often enough... Maybe the modern makerspace is a reinvention of an old concept? I have no idea.

Nope

I am an IT Technician, I guess I would explain my job as being a scollar and a teacher.

I direct a controlled form of lightning down metal wires to power electric candles, and other amazing devices.

I help shops with their inventory.

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.

Books

I'd have to go through a bunch of concepts about light, moving motion and photography in general but I'm sure we'd get there eventually.