You Can Do That?

One of the most common questions to ask someone else, especially if you're just trying to make small talk, is what they do for a living. You've probably got a different answer, depending on who's asking.

Maybe one person, perhaps older, has no chance of really understanding what you do. Maybe another person can get a more technical and precise explanation. Or maybe you just try to brush the question off.

Still, it's an interesting question, especially if you have a weird job. Even if you have a "normal" job, if you were forced to explain your day-to-day, how surprised would people be by what you're doing?

In this week's letter, Rob and Patrick talk about this and more.

Patrick: There were, at max, 42 people in the mix for the family vacation I was just on. That number is a bit deceptive, though, because fully one-third of that count are a constantly growing brood of grandchildren. My nine-year-old is, like me, the oldest of their generation. My six-year-old, who once was the youngest, is happy to be somewhere in the middle now.

My favorite group of grandchildren are these three boys that can only be described as the werewolf kids from the Hotel Transylvania movies. This short clip will help get you up to speed. I forget their exact ages, but it’s roughly an eight-year-old, a seven-year-old, and a five-year-old.

(I will never forget a family gathering where my cousin told me she was pregnant, to which I replied, “What do you mean? You just had a baby.” She responded with a smiling frown face. It’s when I learned the term "Irish twins,” or two babies born within the same year of each other.)

There was a moment where I came over and tried to help diagnose why their original Wii wasn’t working. It could have been any number of issues, given how physical these boys play, but something tells me it was, I don’t know, the deep gashes on literally every disc, or the way each boy slammed the disc into the drive before realizing it was probably interested the wrong way.

I offered to plug in my Switch 2, which I’d lugged along on the trip in hopes of squeezing in a few rounds of Wii Sports Golf with my brother. (Didn’t happen, sadly.) They started poking and prodding at my Switch 2 while I was fiddling with the TV setup, at which point they began to realize I have access to what feels like to them, and I direct quote, “every game ever made.”

It’s at that point my nine-year-old pointed out that I “talk and write about video games for a job, he writes like a thousand words every week.” Every boy gave the same confused response, because the concept of “one thousand” is already tough, let alone “one thousand words.”

But they started asking about my job, and I explained that I play and talk about video games for a living. The concept absolutely confounded them. Which, to be fair, it should. Very few people get a chance to do this job. But it got me wondering about the first time where I realized “wait, you can do that for a living?” I cannot think of a specific moment in time, or a specific job, but I was obsessed with movies after Jurassic Park activated me, and that’s when I started to learn what a “director” was. The concept of being on a movie set was my “you can do that?” moment.

Do you remember yours?

Rob: That's a good question. On one level the answer would be, "The first time I read an issue of Video Games & Computer Entertainment." Though Jeff Green's Greanspeak column at CGW is probably the first time I understood that there were actual, ordinary people who somehow had the coolest job I could imagine. Here was a guy talking about worrying about how his kid's classmates' parents looked down their nose at him and complaining about how the adventure game beat was getting worse and worse in the mid-1990s. It made the job real in a way it had never been before.

But at the same time, it never seemed like a real job that I could consider for myself. I certainly hadn't contemplated it at any point in middle school, high school, or college. It was a career the way winning the lottery could be how someone made a living. My plan was to go to grad school and become a professor. And then once MK got a fancy PhD, all our problems would be solved (yeah, about that academic job market…).