I’m a welder, and the general public doesn’t seem to understand why we charge so much for our services. Like, 80% of my work is fit-up, alignment, math, measurements, and work area prep.

All the public sees is “durr, me hot glue metal! All done!” That’s exactly what you get with Jim Bob who owns a welder yet has never trained for it. He’s cheap, his welds are ugly, and they’re likely to fail in the near future.

Just google the error message. Copy, paste. Read the top 5 results.

No, click on the results and read the page.

Did you read it? Explain to me why it doesn’t work.

Still broken? Call the vendor.

Nothing about game development is “easy”

It’s at least mostly going away nowadays, but…pulling a fire alarm will not make your school fire sprinklers go off. Getting one sprinkler to go off is just that. One sprinkler. None of the rest will go off.

Also, fires in a building are never a spot here, a spot there, over there a spot, and just randomly burning patches all over the place. It just grows out and up from its origin point, for the most part. It doesn’t magically plant little patches all over the place. It’s also often times so smoky and so thick with smoke that you quite literally couldn’t see a big portion of fire if it were ten feet in front of you. You feel the heat and maybe see a faint bit of orange glow. Sometimes you don’t even get to see that.

Space is hard. You’re strapping something inside a big tube with basically directed explosives at the bottom, hoping it survives the trip, then subjecting it to constant radiation, huge temperature swings, and other brutal environmental factors like micrometeoroids. Just because we’ve been sending satellites and people up to space for nearly 70 years doesn’t mean it’s gotten easier; we’re just better at knowing what to expect so we can test for it. Failures in rockets or satellites or even manned spacecraft are going to happen as much as we work to prevent them.

The more users you have, the more expensive it is to run.

Like, compute, storage, bandwidth, none of that is free. If you’re providing a free service, like Wikipedia, and you have many millions of users, like Wikipedia, your expenses will be enormous. You can either accept donations, like Wikipedia, require payment, or sell your users.

If there’s something you like that’s free online, support them. If they don’t accept donations, well, I hate to tell you, you’re the product.

Just because I’m an IT guy, it doesn’t mean I know why your laptop is slow.

Still studying, but I often see people think that WiFi = Internet.

Thankfully, some of them at least acknowledge existence of “Exclamation mark WiFi”.

I can’t and wouldn’t teach your kid to be gay. I can’t get him to write his fucking name at the top of the page.

Radioactive contamination: things don’t transfer the property of radioactivity to everything they touch and/or irradiate. If that were the case, the entire Earth universe would have become radioactive gray goo long, long ago.

When radiation workers talk about “contamination,” we mean radioactive compounds have physically transferred from one object onto/into another. For example, tools becoming contaminated with radioactive metal dust from equipment they touch, or clothing absorbing radioactive iodine gas from the air.

There is a form of radiation called neutron radiation that does make some formerly stable things (mainly metals) radioactive. This isn’t something you’re likely to encounter unless you’re a specific type of radiation worker, however.

This is mainly gear-grindy to me because the reason we don’t have gamma-sterilized produce in the US is completely unfounded fear that gamma irradiation “contaminates” everything it touches. So we could be having lovely fresh strawberries and peppers that last weeks longer than they usually do, but no, we can’t because rAdIaTiOn ScArY 🙄

Everyone gets older. Everyones body breaks down eventually. The amount of elderly who have said “I never thought something like this would happen to me”. Look around Edna! What made you think you were going to avoid what happens to everyone else!?

I do not literally build buildings. I design them, I document them for construction, I collaborate with other people who do actually build the buildings to make sure everything’s on the level.

Most people don’t understand the real cost of software development, because the price of apps creates skewed expectations. In practice, software companies employ a business model that amortizes costs over time, making the true investment less obvious to users. The apparent simplicity of well-designed apps can also mislead users about the complexity involved. So, if somebody sees an app that costs a dollar they might assume that the cost of developing the app might be a few hundred dollars, while in practices it can be hundreds of thousands.

Sometimes your printer won’t print in black and white if a color is out because it uses all of the colors to create a deeper black. Depends on the model though.

And some of them use yellow as a lubricant because yellow toner has a consistency close to water.

Also, please do not copy money or your butt. Trust me.

Read the error message. The whole thing.

This comes up even with coworkers who are allegedly senior software developers.

“It’s just a white page it’s not working”

“Ok well what does the console say? Network requests?”

“403?”

“Ok now what’s in the response body?”

“The what?”

"Click on it. Then response "

"It says I don’t have permission to view this page "

“Do you have permission to view this page?”

“…no.”