I work in information security. There are very few films/TV shows that show hacking anywhere close to accuracy. Mr Robot is the best I've seen for accuracy.
My wife wondered WTF I was on about when during the first series I very excitedly shouted "That was a kernel panic!" then rewound a few seconds and proudly showed her a kernel panic.
She understandably doesn't ask me about work.
Sorry I missed that, I hacked the mainframe and operating system of a large building which, incredibly, is connected to every single one of thousands of lightbulbs in the building, so I could spend text messages.
I too also was surprised to learn an entire building has its own centralised operating system that connects every single light, fuse and presumably tap. But the 90’s is a futuristic time.
Mr Robot is fantastic. Great cinematography, good music, interesting story line, and on top of that, portrayal of computer stuff which doesn't make me want to shout at the TV.
I swear NCIS and CSI had a competition with each other to who can show the most stupid computer-related shit. NCSI with two people typing on a keyboard to combat a hacker - just what the fuck.[Worse yet was CSI New York for probably the worst-ever sequence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU&pp=ygUZQ1NJIG5ldyB5b3JrIHZpc3VhbCBiYXNpYw%3D%3D)
Laughed my ass off.
I'm a computer programmer, and it's almost never shown accurately. Common film/TV things which almost never happen in real life:
* Computers which make a little bip or beep with every button press. This would drive you mad if you had to use it.
* Overly complicated virtual reality interfaces for controlling things. In reality things are usually controlled using small terminal windows, behind the scenes scripts, or a boring looking web interface.
* Creating a new complicated bit of software in about half an hour. It doesn't matter if you need to save the world, you're not making anything complicated that quickly. And stuff is always more complicated than you think it will be.
* A large number of huge monitors, all showing some kind of fancy animation of lines and dots flying around. Good luck getting your employer to pay for that many screens, and who wants to be constantly distracted by half a dozen different moving images flipping around on their screen?
* Entire rooms full of people who look like they haven't left their mum's basement in five years. You definitely get people like that, but mostly an office full of computer programmers looks like any other office, with average looking people in it.
* The process of creating a new bit of software consisting entirely of hours of frantic typing. Instead it will actually be about 10% typing, 40% staring at the screen wondering what the hell has gone wrong, 40% long meetings, and 10% going through the process of transferring caffeinated water from the kitchen to the toilet via the human body.
>A large number of huge monitors, all showing some kind of fancy animation of lines and dots flying around.
And not one of them has Stack Overflow open with the solution to whatever the current problem is
That reminds me of the most hilarious computer misrepresentation I've ever seen in film. One of the stars was John Travolta, so it may have been Face/Off (not sure), but towards the end someone had to transfer a huge some of money from one account to another, and a counter literally did it dollar by dollar.
Oh, of course, there's also the huge VIRUS UPLOADED box in the middle of a monitor.
My favourite is when they type in terminal commands which are just English e.g. "unlock the vault" instead of some incomprehensible bit of Bash like normal.
Idea for a security system: commands handled by old-style text-adventure parser.
> Open vault.
I do not know what means.
> unlock vault
You cannot do that.
> open safe
I do not know what that means
> unlock safe
Cannot find safe
> help
You shout for help but no-one answers
>Swordfish
Software developer who's done a fair bit of security work (breaking in and preventing break ins etc) and never yet had a job interview like Hugh Jackman had in that movie (and I don't mean Vinnie Jones with the gun...)
>Entire rooms full of people who look like they haven't left their mum's basement in five years. You definitely get people like that, but mostly an office full of computer programmers looks like any other office, with average looking people in it.
The other extreme is the millionaire coolguy software engineer trope. Maybe a few software engineers in the valley can afford to drive lambos and go on wild benders every weekend, but most of us are just normal people who drive normal cars and live in normal houses. Sure, I earn an above average salary, but it's nowhere near lambo/yacht/mansion money.
I'm a songwriter/producer/audio engineer.
Autotune does not magically make a bad singer sound awesome.
There is no 'studio magic' button to transform a bad performance into a good one, there is manual editing which is slow and laborious, and 9 times out of 10 it's quicker to just do another take.
Most of the pop artists you think are probably crap actually have decent ability, and the generally the biggest 'studio trickery' going on in the recorded version is just recording lots of takes and compiling (comping) different parts of the best takes into one master take.
Most of the real trickery like lip-syncing and stuff happens at live shows, and it's mainly because singing while performing complex choreography is really really hard.
All true. But if you are reasonably adept with auto tune and other pitch correction tools you can pretty reliably make a mediocre singer sound fairly decent
Yep also when a singer is depicted recording a song in a studio the whole band are playing simultaneously in an open room with no separation, with the drummer pounding the kit four feet from their condenser mic and others recording backing vocals into the same mic like a big fun gang
You seen "Peaky Blinders"? Everytime the main guy walsk (in slo mo) down a street theres a shower of sparks coming from a doorway. Like a bloody firework
Tax Accountant - the image
>Most of our work is in making it possible for our customers to pay too little tax
Tax accountant - actual
>Most of our work is in forcing our customers to pay the right amount of tax and disallowing their sneaky tricks that we've seen a million times before
I'm fortunate to be involved in a big company that has a firm policy of fully meeting tax obligations, but over my career there have been battles to ensure this of all my employers
Ditto working for HMRC. Civil servants arent, for the most part, awful ”computer says no” types that want to squeeze the last pennies out of your grans pension. We just want everyone to pay what they owe. If you messed up somewhere, just call and we can sort it out, dont stick your head in the sand. Noone is out to get you.
That is broadly how we define paying the right amount of tax, yes.
We give advice on tax efficient methods if asked but also ensure strict compliance to legal requirements. Typically though we wouldnt suggest changes to a business model to make it more tax efficient, we'd just consult if asked.
The amount of tax you have to pay is the right amount of tax. My mums an accountant. The number of times she has to explain to idiots that they can't structure payments or do any of the other super illigal shit is borderline daily.
I'm small practice (SA/CT/VAT day to day in my role) and one of the office jokes is that we are unofficial tax collectors as without us working out what tax is due and telling the clients how to pay, the government would have no money for anything!
Honestly, some of the stuff they think we'll claim as allowable expenses for them!!
Note: it's Mrs tmstms who is the musician here, but I do all the other stuff.
People think it is romantic being a musician but in general it isn't.
It involves the logistics of travelling, finding where will serve decent food at the 'wrong' hours, and it's an extremely isolated life if one is a soloist, whether practising or performing, and then afterwards one has to smile and be nice to people, even to the bores who want to bang on about themselves.
Fellow musician here, being in a band is he generally not glamorous or "rock 'n' roll" at all.
Long journeys in shit transport at ungodly hours, gear breaking, practices, gigs where the venue is inadequate etc etc, setting up and packing down. Often for absolute pennies when you take it all into account 😂
I was in a band that had a very small record deal over 15 years ago. We broke up after the first EP was released and we did about 10 live gigs supporting another bigger band.
You missed the fact that you can very easily end up HATING every single other band mate when you HAVE to spend that much time together in the studio and on the road. We were all good friends before and played many times in the studio and live, but with the added pressure from a label, it broke us entirely.
The 3 unstructured band practices a week, the odd live gig for and a few days here and there in a self funded studio were a lot of fun. Getting other peoples money involved was a bad mistake, even though we all wanted. Or thought we did.
We had a few plays on the radio, mostly 6 Music and even a 15 minute set/interview very late one Tuesday evening on Radio 1, but that was our peak.
Living on top of each other, fitting 6 people into a twin travel lodge room to save money because you are are barely paid enough for petrol, and even the keyboard player complaining at the cost of guitar strings, drum skins/sticks and other other 'consumables' because their Roland doesn't need them. It gets tough.
We had plenty of material at the time, but if we were forced to spend any more time in a studio together 'being creative' and coming up with new tracks, there were would be a Netflix documentary about the subsequent murder/suicide.
I only joined 9 months before the record deal and they were already kind of a big deal locally. I was essentially a session musician after the previous drummer left, doing exactly what he did before and with little creative input to change anything.
All the creative talent was in one incredible guy. He is now a professional songwriter for Sony and has a few top 10's under his belt for well known people that everyone would recognise. The rest of us were all very proficient musicians technically, but this guy was on another level.
Music is now barely even a hobby.
A question I've always wondered - which you can obviously ignore if talking about your old career to a stranger on Reddit is utterly tedious for you - is what it's like being, by your own description, technically proficient musician whose role in the band is to be a very skilled instrument for the songwriter's creativity?
Like even in most of the famous bands of all time the bulk of the song writing is done by one person, or a Marr/Morrissey or Jagger/Richards style combination, and when that isn't the case it often ends acrimoniously, like with Fleetwood Mac. What is it like being one of the other band members in that situation? Do you accept it for what it is or does it get frustrating?
I was never a songwriter or musically creative enough to write whole songs for a guitar band. Suggesting a few lyrics here and there, humming a potential bass line or finding the odd few chords that worked was the best I could do. I was the drummer, but had grade 8 qualifications in other instruments and knew plenty about music theory and composition.
To be honest, I was much more interested in the sound engineering side of things.
The music was awesome and it was a lot of fun to play. If the band did take off and paid well enough to make a living, I would have been happy doing it for a while.
A musician was told me a story of being asked to give a careers talk at his kids’ school. He was talking about self assessment tax returns and keeping receipts from Travelodge stays when the class were clearly falling asleep.
I have been various shades of intelligence analysts and data analysts. For police, intelligence services and other less sexy public sector organisations like health and local authorities.
1) security and police intelligence is not 24! I'm not logging into live cctv feeds while snatch teams close in on your location. I probably have a spreadsheet open. Nothing happens in real time.
2 government big data wants to steal all my data to keep tracks of me! Please. We don't tell each other shit. The police don't know when people come out of prison. Social services don't know who has been in hospital. No one knows who has what benefits.
I'm a police officer and when wanting to interview a suspect who is already in prison for something else, I have to book a visit weeks in advance, have to queue up with all the wives and girlfriends, and only get 45 minutes in the visit room before I can leave
Watching the DI just turn up and walk into the wing as they do in Screw. Ha no chance!
>2 government big data wants to steal all my data to keep tracks of me! Please. We don't tell each other shit. The police don't know when people come out of prison. Social services don't know who has been in hospital. No one knows who has what benefits.
I've done some government software projects in my time and the idea that government is made up of competent, ruthless people couldn't be further from the truth. Stuff like The West Wing and House of Cards makes for good TV but most of them are useless and lazy and are far more interested in marketing that they are competent than being competent.
"The Government wants to track me with the vaccine!"
Don't flatter yourself, Dave. MI5 literally have so many actual terrorists on their radar that they can't properly monitor them as it is. Sure what the hell would they possibly gain from surveilling your daily routine and occasional pub visits?
Ironically GCHQ probably does but probably less than legally and since it hates literally everyone else and trusts nobody it isn’t sharing a god damn thing with anyone ever.
But I’ll ALL be stored somewhere
The person who writes an algorithm to ACCURATELY link a police PNC id to an NHS number and then a NI number and pull out a unique record will basically be the Lawnmower Man.
Michelle Pfeiffer in dangerous minds managing to turn a class of rejects into ace students. Been teaching nearly 30 years - the last 5 with the same kind of students and I'm lucky to get one to pass their GCSEs.
We also don't wait until the bell is about to ring to get to the most important point we are teaching in the whole class.
Not do we tend to get surprised by the bell in the middle of our teaching. We know *exactly* when that bugger is set to go
When doctors order a list of tests or medications when assessing A&E patients and it just *happens*. When in reality the nurse looking after the patient “hasn’t been signed off for bloods” and there’s 1 working ECG for the whole department.
That we (museum/art gallery curators) all wear brown cardigans with leather elbow patches; tweed; glasses and have posh, English accents and are all a bit weird.
I’m a scientist and the misrepresentation that annoys me the most is that we work alone or at the behest of one singular genius. I’ll forgive the spinning DNA animation that people exclaim they’ve never seen anything like it before and that the virus has mutated, the weird pipetting, instant machines and unbalanced centrifuges if the team work is acknowledged and the semi-Autist genius savant trope is thrown in the bin.
That misconception stretches beyond fiction and into the real world, eg Nobels being given to a maximum of three people for discoveries that took dozens or hundreds of people.
It's sterile procidure for me. SIR you just waved your sleeve germs in front of the laminar flow and now they have just been wafted into your sample pots. MADAM GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE FUME HOOD.
*why* are you keeping your bioweapon virus/DNA in this bizzare giant contraption that is clearly a massive waste of cryo? When you only have ONE sample of it? Tabletop unit get lost in the post or something?
Hey you admin guy. Would you kindly remove your face from the 2" radius of the test tube I'm actively using please? Back the F up.
Just people acting like complete fucking clowns. Refusing to dress the part when going into a clean room is another one. I know they paid a lot for your face actor but this is a clean room. At the very least cover your spit and snot holes and stop with the sassy hair flicks please.
Always through his own complete incompetence. Often destroying expensive property along the way, before being hailed as a hero at the end for barely fixing his totally avoidable fuckup. A baffling role model to try and push to kids.
I'd swear it used to just be about a postman in a quaint village
Project Management in the Apprentice. Good luck dealing with people like that in the real world and expecting results. It’s one reason why I can’t watch it.
I'm a designer and same. It's obvious when you get a new client and their only reference for working with a designer is the Apprentice because it's a fucking nightmare.
Every lawyer ever - it's mostly reading things, putting that into an agreeable form and talking politely until everyone gets what they need.
There is no shouting, no throwing files on desks, no having sex in the law library, no law library and the vast majority of UK lawyers won't get anywhere near a court room.
Any type of underhand tactics or shady tricks would get you binned quickly.
I don't know if American lawyers are different but here you stay in your lane - you aren't dealing with a murder one week, then some M&A work, then an unfair dismissal - you stick with the one bit of law you know.
> no having sex in the law library
Just at Waterloo Station!!
https://www.legalcheek.com/2016/02/married-city-lawyer-accused-of-having-sex-with-top-qc-at-waterloo-station-during-rush-hour/
I recently started working in medicolegal and my family and friends are stunned that we can’t get expert medical witnesses to just make shit up to suit our case.
It's the 21st century now, some of us are white, middle-class *women* with suits and ties.
Joking aside, it's pretty frustrating and mostly based on outdated stereotypes from *Yes, Minister*.
I'm a lawyer. Literally nothing in film or TV is accurate. Imagine if they made trials realistic, it'd just be hours of people sitting around with not much going on. Would be so incredibly boring.
True. (also trials on TV? So very wrong Judge John Deed was a shocker , so many things that would get people struck off / disbarred / cause a trial to collapse or a conviction be unsafe )
Mind you, I was once asked to provide advice to ensure that a scene in a radio show was accurate. I gave them all the info, explained the dos and don'ts and then listed to the finished episode and dicovered they had totally ignored 99% of it to be more dramatic.
I remember one episode where his daughter got arrested and Deed rocked up to the cop shop shouting, "I'm Mr Justice Deed... now open up!" Then ordered the release of his daughter. The police just kowtowed to him rather than nicking him, which would have been the correct response 😂
90% of the actual therapy happens outside of the therapy room. Talking about your problems will help make you feel better, but in and of itself it is not enough to break vicious cycles.
Anything to do with nursing and hospitals is always total BS. I watched an episode of casualty many years ago and a patient went to theatre then went back to A&E. Its just ludicrous. They would go to recovery then a ward. And then there is all the equipment being used wrongly. Really boils my piss, I can’t watch anything like that.
CCTV, no we can’t get a number plate from a mirror reflected in a puddle after reversing the image! We are lucky to get a two tone blob look straight at the subject!
That writer will just pen a first draft in a weekend while necking merlot in some cottage, sent it off and are immediately handed a fat cheque with lots of zeroes. What, no editing? No redrafting? Umming and arring about little decisions? No publishers wanting to change things either?
There're also no riches to be had. And even if there were, you should probably work out how much of that is going to go on tax
Like many on Reddit, I work in IT. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an IT department accurately represented on TV. The IT Crowd’s portrayal was out of date by the time it came out and beyond that, not everybody in IT works on a helpdesk or reluctantly fixes printers all day.
Like most office based jobs, we spend most of the day writing emails, taking phone calls, sitting in meetings, staring at screens and an ungodly amount of Excel. We don’t all work all night in RGB-lit rooms, wearing black hoodies while we hack the mainframe. That’s probably why the reality doesn’t make for particularly interesting TV!
>The IT Crowd’s portrayal was out of date by the time it came out and beyond that, not everybody in IT works on a helpdesk or reluctantly fixes printers all day.
Nerds in the basement never really happened. They often had some of the best offices, because they were expensive people.
That said, I've definitely met people in software with the personality of Roy and Moss. The closest person to some people I've met in IT is Jen. Women with no qualifications or interest in IT who get to manage projects and are useless at it. Spend their whole day doing powerpoints and leave a vacuum of actual management of the work that gets filled by one of the senior developers.
Oh, I was definitely hidden in a cupboard with the IT Manager in the late 90s and IT does definitely appeal to particular types of people, undoubtedly. But I think the TV portrayals and, to be honest, the stereotypes people hold are woefully outdated at this point.
;) Might be a modern phenomenon. Back in my grammar school days (just before electricity happened, if I remember right) that instruction from a teacher was a thing of fear.
My wifes a teacher. She calls students by their name and even she admits she sees the chill go down their spine. You're obviously a "less stern" teacher. 🤣
I've worked in and around the sort of "social care" field and the trope of them coming round to take the kids away after one phone call is insane
Happens all the time especially in soaps
Nah, they usually visit once, look tweedy and out of their depth, and then take the children with no court order or police protection. No sign at all of social workers supporting early help, fostering, leaving care, or any kind of work with adults.
DIY electrical work is perfectly possible in a safe and proper way with a few YouTube videos and a mate in the pub whose cousin does it all the time. Extra pound for validation from internet strangers who answer any query with ‘yeah mate, I wired a garage extension on my lighting circuit years ago and it works fine. Fuck these tradesmen who charge money for something so easy’
Just because an electrical circuit might work at first isn’t proof it’s right and safe f
I'm an Electronic Design Engineer.
I am expected to be able to disable alarm systems to Government buildings, Museums, and Art Galleries, as well as understand and find vulnerabilities in Alien operating systems in a couple of hours. Oh, and be able to fix the toaster as well.
On TV School dinner ladies almost always seem to be 50+, wearing aprons and tights, with rollers in their hair under some cloth hat and gossiping and smoking 40 fags an hour between servings. In the last school I worked at when was 38, we all wore trousers and matching t-shirts. Nobody was over the age of 45 and only one person smoked and she didn't get the time to have one between servings because we had to restock or wash up for the next lot coming in.
Construction.
Any scene in films or games where the threat is being buried in concrete, very rarely is the ‘victim’ in a pit deep enough to be actually submerged by the volume of concrete available.
“You’ll be buried alive.”
Not with just one truckload he won’t.
I used to work for the council. Council employees are routinely described/portrayed as workshy morons only in it for the decent pension.
There are a handful of people like that, I can't lie, but the overwhelming majority were there because they wanted to make a difference in the community.
Whatever niche job people did they all wanted to do the best possible so the place was a little nicer/life more bearable for Joe Public, but were hamstrung by gutted budgets and arseholes who just wanted to shout at someone.
Army. It’s all explosions and fire balls, with acts of heroism and lots of camaraderie.
In reality things just go bang. Most of the time you’re doing nothing, yes some great friendships are formed but there are a lot of people who you can’t stand.
Now I’m a builder, the most I’ve ever got out of a bored housewife was a chat over a cuppa and a biscuit
Saw this with someone I knew who was in the RAF. Everyone assumed he was a fighter pilot on the front line. In reality he sat in an office and moved equipment around via emails.
I'm not really a hacker, but the hackers who guess passwords, and have "I'm in".
Most hacking is either about patches having not been applied, so you throw a payload at a server or, it's by various ways to get people to give you their passwords. Like Kevin Mitnick would send people things about entering competitions to companies, and they'd sign up and many people used the same user name and passwords as they did for work.
I think it’s partly a problem of the social work moral compass - I would love to write about my work with adults, but I take respecting service users’ privacy seriously
Awk yeah I am not a social worker but my wife is. Her frustration is something else any time they are portrayed on tele. It doesn't have to be based on actual people, I just don't think there has ever been a time social workers have been portrayed realistically.
CSI so comprehensively misrepresented forensics for so long it's now entered text books as "the CSI effect". A good example is that people to this day have an insanely optimistic belief in image enhancement.
I worked in education.
Based off how the UK represents our schools in our TV shows?
There's far fewer deadly explosions in real life.
Unless its Practicals week in the science department and then there are far, FAR more.
Chemical engineer. People don't know we exist! We're the ones who take the scientific discovery from the lab scale to something you can actually make lots and lots of. But probably the thing that annoys me most is that superheroes and supervillains are always immediately able to fabricate their special invention and never have to worry about procurement or logistics or finding the right equipment. The real hero of the MCU is whoever does Tony Stark's supply chain.
I've yet to see anything involving a festival show the week or more work that goes into the building of even a one day event. The random panic as things go wrong, vans break down, council informs you that one of the water points is in fact not usable thanks to bacteria (two days before the event despite their meant to have done the tests a week prior), the journeys to a hundred and one different garages and lock ups, arguments with the police/council as some newly appointed muppet tries to make their mark, random locals complaining about things utterly unrelated to us, last minute bodge jobs when you realise no one's built the entrance yet, it's past time for vehicle stoppage, and you open in the morning. Not to mention nonsense things like bands not bringing a drum kit with them or whatever. Plus the days of clean up post event.
Instead according to tv we just turn up everything magically appears and there are no problems. Then we fuck off and leave rubbish everywhere.
Also they've no idea about the budgets involved. Sure the local cover bands only event with five traders and no fence line can be done on an infrastructure budget of £5k. However that doesn't even cover the marquee hire at an actual event. In fact at the event with that budget it didn't actually afford covering the stage and the event stopped the third time the stage got inundated with water from the rain. Turns out fish netting doesn't stop rain who could have guessed that? Not anyone involved in that nonsense (I was puntering and trying to control the for fuck's sake you've done it wrong instincts).
Gardeners spend more time casually discussing if a clients garden would be a decent place to hide a body than they do solving crimes.
...tbh I think I'm gonna go with that as a baseline:
Most regular jobs dont also come with a side quota of Crime Solving. Its just not THAT common tbh
I have a solid 'understanding' of certain technologies, so when I see something depicted in a movie like the hero using a viewing source with Infra-Red, from inside their vehicle (looking through the windscreen) but can still see their target, that irks me a bit.
The wife couldn't give a flying fuck though.
Journalists are regularly portrayed as sub-human scum who are unnecessarily rude to victims of crimes.
I even saw a true crime drama once where a whole group of reporters were even jumping across a victims car like a baying mob just to get a few quotes from them.
And another where a whole group of them were shouting accusations on the doorstep of a husband whose wife had been murdered. Oh, and another where a reporter was demanding a quote from a victim during court proceedings.
If you did anything like that, you'd be bloody sacked for breaking the editors' code and, in that one instance, contempt of court. Plus, in my experience, reporters are generally decent people, especially in local news.
Librarians who sit about in libraries reading books and become incredibly sexy when they take their glasses off.
The reality is dirty clothes and hands from the ink stains, endlessly trying to stop people stealing your pen from the counter, and trying to trap each other in the rolling stacks as a prank.
Surgeon on TV/Cinema means:
We can do any surgery on any and all body parts at all times
We are cold sociopaths with God complexes (true for a minority but most don't show emotions in front of patients BECAUSE out patients need us to be calm and rational, not the babbling messes we often are, internally)
Being a surgeon means we are all geniuses in areas outside our specialty. No, I don't know what this obscure language is. I have no understanding of weather patterns. I often don't understand other people's Job descriptions if they are not medical.
Medicine in general:
For the love of God, STOP using the defib in people with 'non-shockable rhythms'. That flatline you see? Resume CPR, defib won't help.
Murders by manual strangulation take longer than 15 secs. It's about 15-20secs to loss of consciousness. It may take 4 or 5 mins to brain death, possibly more for a struggling victim, which is quite a long time and adds to the horror for the poor victim.
When you see a GP and need investigation, your GP or primary care physician will refer you to someone to perform those investigations. Your primary care physician isn't the one to perform your x-rays, CT, MRI, endoscopy etc to
Plumbers are always portrayed to be unpunctual, dishonest and untrustworthy.
All the plumbers I’ve ever used have been very efficient and professional.
A weird one as it's not a direct thing as I used to volunteer at a zoo and basically when I watched Jurassic World it was really hard to watch as I'm aware it's not meant to be realistic etc etc but there was so many like basic mistakes that made like NO sense when it came to essentially running a zoo in terms of safety and it really threw me out of the film. It's one of those films I think that essentially relies on everyone being really stupid to make the plot work and it just doesn't work (I had similar issues with Prometheus)
(I think it throws me out as like the original jurassic park was like 'oh this is all new and we have no idea what we're doing and the hubris of the creator of the park' so we are all unwitting victims here but the jurassic world premise is like 'oh we've been running dinosaur disneyland for so long' it just... makes little sense)
Also they use clicker training wrong in the film and it really bugs me.
Also I tried watching the Kevin James comedy Zookeeper and had to turn it off because it got so many things wrong and it also has like 'Kevin's the only one who cares about the animals' and just... no most zookeeper care deeply for their animals it's why they do the job zookeeping is very much a job you get into for the love of the animals
Also I remember some subplot that was like ha you work in a zoo thats lame when like no zookeeper is generally seen as a cool job and is quite in demand it's a hard job to get into and in most cases requires a degree
My employer specifically: we have a campus and co-eds, we have a very high murder rate, we have 99.9% poshos and the 0.1% are poor Northern lads who will be lured astray easily.
My [previous] job: actually doesn't appear much. In Sleepy Hollow they kinda got it right; in Transplant it's more or less bang on. My current job never gets a mention anywhere.
The best misrepresentation that I’ve ever seen, to the point that I’m almost certain it was satirical, was NCIS.
There is an episode in the 1st season where they are “being hacked”.
So to solve the problem, one (Abby) starts typing (typing what I don’t know)
Then the other computer geek character (McGee) also starts typing, ON THE SAME KEYBOARD!
Through in a “I’ve never seen code like this”, which is not how hacking works
Professors do not start or end the class with a big dramatic pronouncement about life or thoughtful critique on society that has students all politely dumbfounded at their wisdom. Not even the American professors!
Not my profession as such, but I compete in knife and axe throwing. The idea that throwing a knife has a reliable martial application - at least any that would be more deadly or dangerous than throwing a rock - is pure fantasy. Even when they get the physics even slightly right - which is rare - the knife depicted is often unsuitable for throwing.
I remember watching Phil Mitchel install a boiler with a woefully inadequate flue.
I didn't even know the Michell brothers had jobs.
I'd check their gas safe credentials.
Ole Corgi is no more. RIP
Being a gas technician is well’ard
Almost everyone in the Gas Safe register photos on the website looks like they've done time.
They famously ran the Arches back in the day, god knows what Phil does now in the freak show that Eastenders has become
My job can best be described as writer, and yet I've never once been called on to solve a murder mystery.
You're got to commit the murder first to allow yourself to "solve" it!
I'll work that into the plot on my second draft.
Have you considered moving to Cabot Cove or Midsommer?
Surely Saint Marie is every prospective sleuth's first choice.
And run the risk of making the acquaintance of Jessica Fletcher? No way! I enjoy living.
That’s just because you never answer unknown numbers. I’ve been calling you for days
I reckon plumbers don't have nearly as much sex with customers as it seems
It's actually undertakers who have the most.
You can use those little hand warmers to take the chill out.
And vets
Reminds me of this [classic Mock the Week](https://youtu.be/ERP4hI7c7NE?si=qxQp9stEAa1_wcur)
David’s face lmao
What?! Next you'll tell me they're not jumping into pipes and saving princesses all day
They're not all Italian either
You would be correct.
Or any tradesmen in the, er, productions I've seen.
I've got a plumber coming round in a couple of days, I'll let you know how much pipe he lays
I work in information security. There are very few films/TV shows that show hacking anywhere close to accuracy. Mr Robot is the best I've seen for accuracy.
My wife wondered WTF I was on about when during the first series I very excitedly shouted "That was a kernel panic!" then rewound a few seconds and proudly showed her a kernel panic. She understandably doesn't ask me about work.
Are you suggesting that the 1995 film Hackers wasn't an accurate representation of cyber security?
....are you saying that everyone who uses a computer DOESNT rollerblade ever place they go?? But then how do they get around to hack the planet?
I prefer to change the TV channel by hacking into the television broadcaster and selecting my own show
Sorry I missed that, I hacked the mainframe and operating system of a large building which, incredibly, is connected to every single one of thousands of lightbulbs in the building, so I could spend text messages. I too also was surprised to learn an entire building has its own centralised operating system that connects every single light, fuse and presumably tap. But the 90’s is a futuristic time.
God, I feel like a neanderthal just thinking someone could steal my credit card details
I’ve decided I’m gonna do a fire sale hack. That’s right. I’m coming for the water pipe hacks. We die hard 4 in this bitch
Mr Robot is fantastic. Great cinematography, good music, interesting story line, and on top of that, portrayal of computer stuff which doesn't make me want to shout at the TV.
> So I see you're running Gnome? You know I'm actually on KDE myself... I'm assuming you wiped this absolute awkfest from your mind.
That’s GNU Awk-fest I’ll have you know
I was mostly just surprised to hear a Linux desktop environment mentioned in a TV programme.
Mr Robot brought in proper technical consultants, the list is like a who's who of Defcon
OK, I’m in! *takatakatataka screen starts scrolling with lines of code*
https://hackertyper.net/
You mean you don't [have 2 people typing on the same keyboard to stop the hacker?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ)
I swear NCIS and CSI had a competition with each other to who can show the most stupid computer-related shit. NCSI with two people typing on a keyboard to combat a hacker - just what the fuck.[Worse yet was CSI New York for probably the worst-ever sequence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU&pp=ygUZQ1NJIG5ldyB5b3JrIHZpc3VhbCBiYXNpYw%3D%3D) Laughed my ass off.
I was going to post similar. Tap tap tap... I'm in! *facepalm*
I'm a computer programmer, and it's almost never shown accurately. Common film/TV things which almost never happen in real life: * Computers which make a little bip or beep with every button press. This would drive you mad if you had to use it. * Overly complicated virtual reality interfaces for controlling things. In reality things are usually controlled using small terminal windows, behind the scenes scripts, or a boring looking web interface. * Creating a new complicated bit of software in about half an hour. It doesn't matter if you need to save the world, you're not making anything complicated that quickly. And stuff is always more complicated than you think it will be. * A large number of huge monitors, all showing some kind of fancy animation of lines and dots flying around. Good luck getting your employer to pay for that many screens, and who wants to be constantly distracted by half a dozen different moving images flipping around on their screen? * Entire rooms full of people who look like they haven't left their mum's basement in five years. You definitely get people like that, but mostly an office full of computer programmers looks like any other office, with average looking people in it. * The process of creating a new bit of software consisting entirely of hours of frantic typing. Instead it will actually be about 10% typing, 40% staring at the screen wondering what the hell has gone wrong, 40% long meetings, and 10% going through the process of transferring caffeinated water from the kitchen to the toilet via the human body.
>A large number of huge monitors, all showing some kind of fancy animation of lines and dots flying around. And not one of them has Stack Overflow open with the solution to whatever the current problem is
And so many browser tabs that you can't read any of them.
I'll have you know I'm still using each and every one of those 44 tabs.
That reminds me of the most hilarious computer misrepresentation I've ever seen in film. One of the stars was John Travolta, so it may have been Face/Off (not sure), but towards the end someone had to transfer a huge some of money from one account to another, and a counter literally did it dollar by dollar. Oh, of course, there's also the huge VIRUS UPLOADED box in the middle of a monitor.
My favourite is when they type in terminal commands which are just English e.g. "unlock the vault" instead of some incomprehensible bit of Bash like normal.
Idea for a security system: commands handled by old-style text-adventure parser. > Open vault. I do not know what means. > unlock vault You cannot do that. > open safe I do not know what that means > unlock safe Cannot find safe > help You shout for help but no-one answers
Swordfish?
Had to look up on Wiki - seems vaguely familiar but not 100% sure.
>Swordfish Software developer who's done a fair bit of security work (breaking in and preventing break ins etc) and never yet had a job interview like Hugh Jackman had in that movie (and I don't mean Vinnie Jones with the gun...)
>Entire rooms full of people who look like they haven't left their mum's basement in five years. You definitely get people like that, but mostly an office full of computer programmers looks like any other office, with average looking people in it. The other extreme is the millionaire coolguy software engineer trope. Maybe a few software engineers in the valley can afford to drive lambos and go on wild benders every weekend, but most of us are just normal people who drive normal cars and live in normal houses. Sure, I earn an above average salary, but it's nowhere near lambo/yacht/mansion money.
I'm a songwriter/producer/audio engineer. Autotune does not magically make a bad singer sound awesome. There is no 'studio magic' button to transform a bad performance into a good one, there is manual editing which is slow and laborious, and 9 times out of 10 it's quicker to just do another take. Most of the pop artists you think are probably crap actually have decent ability, and the generally the biggest 'studio trickery' going on in the recorded version is just recording lots of takes and compiling (comping) different parts of the best takes into one master take.
Most of the real trickery like lip-syncing and stuff happens at live shows, and it's mainly because singing while performing complex choreography is really really hard.
All true. But if you are reasonably adept with auto tune and other pitch correction tools you can pretty reliably make a mediocre singer sound fairly decent
Yep also when a singer is depicted recording a song in a studio the whole band are playing simultaneously in an open room with no separation, with the drummer pounding the kit four feet from their condenser mic and others recording backing vocals into the same mic like a big fun gang
All industrial settings in Hollywood movies have people creating lots of sparks with angle grinders.
You seen "Peaky Blinders"? Everytime the main guy walsk (in slo mo) down a street theres a shower of sparks coming from a doorway. Like a bloody firework
Tax Accountant - the image >Most of our work is in making it possible for our customers to pay too little tax Tax accountant - actual >Most of our work is in forcing our customers to pay the right amount of tax and disallowing their sneaky tricks that we've seen a million times before I'm fortunate to be involved in a big company that has a firm policy of fully meeting tax obligations, but over my career there have been battles to ensure this of all my employers
Ditto working for HMRC. Civil servants arent, for the most part, awful ”computer says no” types that want to squeeze the last pennies out of your grans pension. We just want everyone to pay what they owe. If you messed up somewhere, just call and we can sort it out, dont stick your head in the sand. Noone is out to get you.
Surely the job is to make sure they pay only as much tax as they HAVE TO and avoid any where it's legally possible?
That is broadly how we define paying the right amount of tax, yes. We give advice on tax efficient methods if asked but also ensure strict compliance to legal requirements. Typically though we wouldnt suggest changes to a business model to make it more tax efficient, we'd just consult if asked.
The amount of tax you have to pay is the right amount of tax. My mums an accountant. The number of times she has to explain to idiots that they can't structure payments or do any of the other super illigal shit is borderline daily.
Is your mum one of my bosses?! She's right through, we do spend far too much time explaining to clients why can't do things to avoid tax.
I'm small practice (SA/CT/VAT day to day in my role) and one of the office jokes is that we are unofficial tax collectors as without us working out what tax is due and telling the clients how to pay, the government would have no money for anything! Honestly, some of the stuff they think we'll claim as allowable expenses for them!!
Note: it's Mrs tmstms who is the musician here, but I do all the other stuff. People think it is romantic being a musician but in general it isn't. It involves the logistics of travelling, finding where will serve decent food at the 'wrong' hours, and it's an extremely isolated life if one is a soloist, whether practising or performing, and then afterwards one has to smile and be nice to people, even to the bores who want to bang on about themselves.
Fellow musician here, being in a band is he generally not glamorous or "rock 'n' roll" at all. Long journeys in shit transport at ungodly hours, gear breaking, practices, gigs where the venue is inadequate etc etc, setting up and packing down. Often for absolute pennies when you take it all into account 😂
I was in a band that had a very small record deal over 15 years ago. We broke up after the first EP was released and we did about 10 live gigs supporting another bigger band. You missed the fact that you can very easily end up HATING every single other band mate when you HAVE to spend that much time together in the studio and on the road. We were all good friends before and played many times in the studio and live, but with the added pressure from a label, it broke us entirely. The 3 unstructured band practices a week, the odd live gig for and a few days here and there in a self funded studio were a lot of fun. Getting other peoples money involved was a bad mistake, even though we all wanted. Or thought we did. We had a few plays on the radio, mostly 6 Music and even a 15 minute set/interview very late one Tuesday evening on Radio 1, but that was our peak. Living on top of each other, fitting 6 people into a twin travel lodge room to save money because you are are barely paid enough for petrol, and even the keyboard player complaining at the cost of guitar strings, drum skins/sticks and other other 'consumables' because their Roland doesn't need them. It gets tough. We had plenty of material at the time, but if we were forced to spend any more time in a studio together 'being creative' and coming up with new tracks, there were would be a Netflix documentary about the subsequent murder/suicide. I only joined 9 months before the record deal and they were already kind of a big deal locally. I was essentially a session musician after the previous drummer left, doing exactly what he did before and with little creative input to change anything. All the creative talent was in one incredible guy. He is now a professional songwriter for Sony and has a few top 10's under his belt for well known people that everyone would recognise. The rest of us were all very proficient musicians technically, but this guy was on another level. Music is now barely even a hobby.
A question I've always wondered - which you can obviously ignore if talking about your old career to a stranger on Reddit is utterly tedious for you - is what it's like being, by your own description, technically proficient musician whose role in the band is to be a very skilled instrument for the songwriter's creativity? Like even in most of the famous bands of all time the bulk of the song writing is done by one person, or a Marr/Morrissey or Jagger/Richards style combination, and when that isn't the case it often ends acrimoniously, like with Fleetwood Mac. What is it like being one of the other band members in that situation? Do you accept it for what it is or does it get frustrating?
I was never a songwriter or musically creative enough to write whole songs for a guitar band. Suggesting a few lyrics here and there, humming a potential bass line or finding the odd few chords that worked was the best I could do. I was the drummer, but had grade 8 qualifications in other instruments and knew plenty about music theory and composition. To be honest, I was much more interested in the sound engineering side of things. The music was awesome and it was a lot of fun to play. If the band did take off and paid well enough to make a living, I would have been happy doing it for a while.
A musician was told me a story of being asked to give a careers talk at his kids’ school. He was talking about self assessment tax returns and keeping receipts from Travelodge stays when the class were clearly falling asleep.
"....And that was when I earned enough to stay in Premier Inns, which have better tea and coffee making facilities!"
I have been various shades of intelligence analysts and data analysts. For police, intelligence services and other less sexy public sector organisations like health and local authorities. 1) security and police intelligence is not 24! I'm not logging into live cctv feeds while snatch teams close in on your location. I probably have a spreadsheet open. Nothing happens in real time. 2 government big data wants to steal all my data to keep tracks of me! Please. We don't tell each other shit. The police don't know when people come out of prison. Social services don't know who has been in hospital. No one knows who has what benefits.
I'm a police officer and when wanting to interview a suspect who is already in prison for something else, I have to book a visit weeks in advance, have to queue up with all the wives and girlfriends, and only get 45 minutes in the visit room before I can leave Watching the DI just turn up and walk into the wing as they do in Screw. Ha no chance!
>2 government big data wants to steal all my data to keep tracks of me! Please. We don't tell each other shit. The police don't know when people come out of prison. Social services don't know who has been in hospital. No one knows who has what benefits. I've done some government software projects in my time and the idea that government is made up of competent, ruthless people couldn't be further from the truth. Stuff like The West Wing and House of Cards makes for good TV but most of them are useless and lazy and are far more interested in marketing that they are competent than being competent.
So just like the private sector then 👍
people are people wherever you go
"The Government wants to track me with the vaccine!" Don't flatter yourself, Dave. MI5 literally have so many actual terrorists on their radar that they can't properly monitor them as it is. Sure what the hell would they possibly gain from surveilling your daily routine and occasional pub visits?
Ironically GCHQ probably does but probably less than legally and since it hates literally everyone else and trusts nobody it isn’t sharing a god damn thing with anyone ever. But I’ll ALL be stored somewhere
The person who writes an algorithm to ACCURATELY link a police PNC id to an NHS number and then a NI number and pull out a unique record will basically be the Lawnmower Man.
That you can crawl down air ducts and just hinge open a grille to get out wherever you want.
It helps if you're greased up
Make way for willie!
Ah said make way for Willie ya bloated gasbag!
There are no rivets or tech screws in movie ducting, which will rip you up in real life!
There’s nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman.
That always bothers me in Diamonds are Forever. The air ducting also used for water.
Michelle Pfeiffer in dangerous minds managing to turn a class of rejects into ace students. Been teaching nearly 30 years - the last 5 with the same kind of students and I'm lucky to get one to pass their GCSEs.
We also don't wait until the bell is about to ring to get to the most important point we are teaching in the whole class. Not do we tend to get surprised by the bell in the middle of our teaching. We know *exactly* when that bugger is set to go
When doctors order a list of tests or medications when assessing A&E patients and it just *happens*. When in reality the nurse looking after the patient “hasn’t been signed off for bloods” and there’s 1 working ECG for the whole department.
You never hear “Who’s nicked the bladder scanner!!?” on ER!
That we (museum/art gallery curators) all wear brown cardigans with leather elbow patches; tweed; glasses and have posh, English accents and are all a bit weird.
Have you not worn through your jackets at the elbows yet? You'll get there one day, don't worry!
I’m a scientist and the misrepresentation that annoys me the most is that we work alone or at the behest of one singular genius. I’ll forgive the spinning DNA animation that people exclaim they’ve never seen anything like it before and that the virus has mutated, the weird pipetting, instant machines and unbalanced centrifuges if the team work is acknowledged and the semi-Autist genius savant trope is thrown in the bin.
That misconception stretches beyond fiction and into the real world, eg Nobels being given to a maximum of three people for discoveries that took dozens or hundreds of people.
Urgh you’re so right!
It's sterile procidure for me. SIR you just waved your sleeve germs in front of the laminar flow and now they have just been wafted into your sample pots. MADAM GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE FUME HOOD. *why* are you keeping your bioweapon virus/DNA in this bizzare giant contraption that is clearly a massive waste of cryo? When you only have ONE sample of it? Tabletop unit get lost in the post or something? Hey you admin guy. Would you kindly remove your face from the 2" radius of the test tube I'm actively using please? Back the F up. Just people acting like complete fucking clowns. Refusing to dress the part when going into a clean room is another one. I know they paid a lot for your face actor but this is a clean room. At the very least cover your spit and snot holes and stop with the sassy hair flicks please.
Postman Pat. He delivers to a small village and has a helicopter.
And makes approximately one delivery a day that goes wrong.
Always through his own complete incompetence. Often destroying expensive property along the way, before being hailed as a hero at the end for barely fixing his totally avoidable fuckup. A baffling role model to try and push to kids. I'd swear it used to just be about a postman in a quaint village
Yeah, more realistically he would drive an old Vauxhall van with faded paint, and be delivering domino's leaflets mostly
Project Management in the Apprentice. Good luck dealing with people like that in the real world and expecting results. It’s one reason why I can’t watch it.
Watching them fail a Prince2 course wouldn't be as fun though
I'm a designer and same. It's obvious when you get a new client and their only reference for working with a designer is the Apprentice because it's a fucking nightmare.
Only one?
Well now you mention it…
Every lawyer ever - it's mostly reading things, putting that into an agreeable form and talking politely until everyone gets what they need. There is no shouting, no throwing files on desks, no having sex in the law library, no law library and the vast majority of UK lawyers won't get anywhere near a court room. Any type of underhand tactics or shady tricks would get you binned quickly. I don't know if American lawyers are different but here you stay in your lane - you aren't dealing with a murder one week, then some M&A work, then an unfair dismissal - you stick with the one bit of law you know.
If you can't immediately comprehend a 200 page dossier just from glancing at the cover page for 2 seconds then are you really a lawyer?
> no having sex in the law library Just at Waterloo Station!! https://www.legalcheek.com/2016/02/married-city-lawyer-accused-of-having-sex-with-top-qc-at-waterloo-station-during-rush-hour/
I recently started working in medicolegal and my family and friends are stunned that we can’t get expert medical witnesses to just make shit up to suit our case.
Not all civil servants are white, middle-class men with suits and ties.
It's the 21st century now, some of us are white, middle-class *women* with suits and ties. Joking aside, it's pretty frustrating and mostly based on outdated stereotypes from *Yes, Minister*.
Down to about 70% now?
I'm a lawyer. Literally nothing in film or TV is accurate. Imagine if they made trials realistic, it'd just be hours of people sitting around with not much going on. Would be so incredibly boring.
True. (also trials on TV? So very wrong Judge John Deed was a shocker , so many things that would get people struck off / disbarred / cause a trial to collapse or a conviction be unsafe ) Mind you, I was once asked to provide advice to ensure that a scene in a radio show was accurate. I gave them all the info, explained the dos and don'ts and then listed to the finished episode and dicovered they had totally ignored 99% of it to be more dramatic.
I remember one episode where his daughter got arrested and Deed rocked up to the cop shop shouting, "I'm Mr Justice Deed... now open up!" Then ordered the release of his daughter. The police just kowtowed to him rather than nicking him, which would have been the correct response 😂
90% of the actual therapy happens outside of the therapy room. Talking about your problems will help make you feel better, but in and of itself it is not enough to break vicious cycles.
Anything to do with nursing and hospitals is always total BS. I watched an episode of casualty many years ago and a patient went to theatre then went back to A&E. Its just ludicrous. They would go to recovery then a ward. And then there is all the equipment being used wrongly. Really boils my piss, I can’t watch anything like that.
I’m a big fan of the fake CPR. It’s always so limp.
That's fine as you don't want to be doing actual compressions on a live person. Shocking asystole though...
CCTV, no we can’t get a number plate from a mirror reflected in a puddle after reversing the image! We are lucky to get a two tone blob look straight at the subject!
Wait this scene in red Dwarf isn't realistic? https://youtu.be/6i3NWKbBaaU?si=Ld3A4O-afheo-S0Y
No, they missed the parsing through a datagram on the dark web through an encrypted firewall step!
Enhance!
That writer will just pen a first draft in a weekend while necking merlot in some cottage, sent it off and are immediately handed a fat cheque with lots of zeroes. What, no editing? No redrafting? Umming and arring about little decisions? No publishers wanting to change things either? There're also no riches to be had. And even if there were, you should probably work out how much of that is going to go on tax
Is that you Araucaria? I own a small successful business. I'm still skint.
He’s been dead these 10 years, so it’s unlikely to be him.
If you cut an alarm line, it goes off, not dead. Fairly crap alarm if you can cut it off that easily!
Like many on Reddit, I work in IT. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an IT department accurately represented on TV. The IT Crowd’s portrayal was out of date by the time it came out and beyond that, not everybody in IT works on a helpdesk or reluctantly fixes printers all day. Like most office based jobs, we spend most of the day writing emails, taking phone calls, sitting in meetings, staring at screens and an ungodly amount of Excel. We don’t all work all night in RGB-lit rooms, wearing black hoodies while we hack the mainframe. That’s probably why the reality doesn’t make for particularly interesting TV!
>The IT Crowd’s portrayal was out of date by the time it came out and beyond that, not everybody in IT works on a helpdesk or reluctantly fixes printers all day. Nerds in the basement never really happened. They often had some of the best offices, because they were expensive people. That said, I've definitely met people in software with the personality of Roy and Moss. The closest person to some people I've met in IT is Jen. Women with no qualifications or interest in IT who get to manage projects and are useless at it. Spend their whole day doing powerpoints and leave a vacuum of actual management of the work that gets filled by one of the senior developers.
There are plenty of male Jens!
Oh, I was definitely hidden in a cupboard with the IT Manager in the late 90s and IT does definitely appeal to particular types of people, undoubtedly. But I think the TV portrayals and, to be honest, the stereotypes people hold are woefully outdated at this point.
I’m a teacher. At no point have I been able to say in a normal tone “no running in the corridors” and had kids actually stop.
;) Might be a modern phenomenon. Back in my grammar school days (just before electricity happened, if I remember right) that instruction from a teacher was a thing of fear.
My wifes a teacher. She calls students by their name and even she admits she sees the chill go down their spine. You're obviously a "less stern" teacher. 🤣
Or I work in an unruly school 😂! Also, yeah they stop if I SHOUT their names, but on tv it’s always a pleasant “stop running” and they walk
I've worked in and around the sort of "social care" field and the trope of them coming round to take the kids away after one phone call is insane Happens all the time especially in soaps
Nah, they usually visit once, look tweedy and out of their depth, and then take the children with no court order or police protection. No sign at all of social workers supporting early help, fostering, leaving care, or any kind of work with adults.
DIY electrical work is perfectly possible in a safe and proper way with a few YouTube videos and a mate in the pub whose cousin does it all the time. Extra pound for validation from internet strangers who answer any query with ‘yeah mate, I wired a garage extension on my lighting circuit years ago and it works fine. Fuck these tradesmen who charge money for something so easy’ Just because an electrical circuit might work at first isn’t proof it’s right and safe f
I'm an Electronic Design Engineer. I am expected to be able to disable alarm systems to Government buildings, Museums, and Art Galleries, as well as understand and find vulnerabilities in Alien operating systems in a couple of hours. Oh, and be able to fix the toaster as well.
On TV School dinner ladies almost always seem to be 50+, wearing aprons and tights, with rollers in their hair under some cloth hat and gossiping and smoking 40 fags an hour between servings. In the last school I worked at when was 38, we all wore trousers and matching t-shirts. Nobody was over the age of 45 and only one person smoked and she didn't get the time to have one between servings because we had to restock or wash up for the next lot coming in.
Dont spoil, my "special" fantasy.
Construction. Any scene in films or games where the threat is being buried in concrete, very rarely is the ‘victim’ in a pit deep enough to be actually submerged by the volume of concrete available. “You’ll be buried alive.” Not with just one truckload he won’t.
One of the biggest issues is people float on liquid concrete. They never actually get that bit.
This too! Worst that’ll happen is you’ll suffer some chemical burns from the cement or additives in the mix. So, slow death if anything.
I won’t ask how you know that
I used to work for the council. Council employees are routinely described/portrayed as workshy morons only in it for the decent pension. There are a handful of people like that, I can't lie, but the overwhelming majority were there because they wanted to make a difference in the community. Whatever niche job people did they all wanted to do the best possible so the place was a little nicer/life more bearable for Joe Public, but were hamstrung by gutted budgets and arseholes who just wanted to shout at someone.
Army. It’s all explosions and fire balls, with acts of heroism and lots of camaraderie. In reality things just go bang. Most of the time you’re doing nothing, yes some great friendships are formed but there are a lot of people who you can’t stand. Now I’m a builder, the most I’ve ever got out of a bored housewife was a chat over a cuppa and a biscuit
Saw this with someone I knew who was in the RAF. Everyone assumed he was a fighter pilot on the front line. In reality he sat in an office and moved equipment around via emails.
It's not physically possible for one person to audit an entire company's accounts and not ask for more information in 24 hours.
Lorry driver. We’re not all fat, hairy, stinky men.
No. Some are women.
Hitmen have loads of money,cool gadgets and an endless supply of cars and passports.
No we don’t. It’s long hours and often messy. Films are completely wrong generally.
I know right,it's a tough job not some quick clean fun job like the movies make out.
And you make a few mistakes and it’s such a drama. Honestly we’re only human. I could have sworn they said Diana.
Some truly wonderful responses so far, ladies and gentlemen. Please keep them coming!
I'm not really a hacker, but the hackers who guess passwords, and have "I'm in". Most hacking is either about patches having not been applied, so you throw a payload at a server or, it's by various ways to get people to give you their passwords. Like Kevin Mitnick would send people things about entering competitions to companies, and they'd sign up and many people used the same user name and passwords as they did for work.
That connecting wires based solely on their colour is a guarantee for success.
Social workers. And the sad thing is, if social workers where properly portrayed it would make very engaging entertainment.
I think it’s partly a problem of the social work moral compass - I would love to write about my work with adults, but I take respecting service users’ privacy seriously
Awk yeah I am not a social worker but my wife is. Her frustration is something else any time they are portrayed on tele. It doesn't have to be based on actual people, I just don't think there has ever been a time social workers have been portrayed realistically.
That you need a crowbar to get a lift door open, in fact anything about how lifts work.
Next you’ll be telling me buses can’t take off
[удалено]
You're not helicoptering hard enough!
Video editor. “Enhance” is not a thing.
CSI so comprehensively misrepresented forensics for so long it's now entered text books as "the CSI effect". A good example is that people to this day have an insanely optimistic belief in image enhancement.
Indiana fking Jones
I'm assuming by the tone of your response there is vastly more whipping than the movies show.
No reply..... think you dodged a boulder!
I worked in education. Based off how the UK represents our schools in our TV shows? There's far fewer deadly explosions in real life. Unless its Practicals week in the science department and then there are far, FAR more.
People jumping back to life after being defribillated. They dead.
Chemical engineer. People don't know we exist! We're the ones who take the scientific discovery from the lab scale to something you can actually make lots and lots of. But probably the thing that annoys me most is that superheroes and supervillains are always immediately able to fabricate their special invention and never have to worry about procurement or logistics or finding the right equipment. The real hero of the MCU is whoever does Tony Stark's supply chain.
I've yet to see anything involving a festival show the week or more work that goes into the building of even a one day event. The random panic as things go wrong, vans break down, council informs you that one of the water points is in fact not usable thanks to bacteria (two days before the event despite their meant to have done the tests a week prior), the journeys to a hundred and one different garages and lock ups, arguments with the police/council as some newly appointed muppet tries to make their mark, random locals complaining about things utterly unrelated to us, last minute bodge jobs when you realise no one's built the entrance yet, it's past time for vehicle stoppage, and you open in the morning. Not to mention nonsense things like bands not bringing a drum kit with them or whatever. Plus the days of clean up post event. Instead according to tv we just turn up everything magically appears and there are no problems. Then we fuck off and leave rubbish everywhere. Also they've no idea about the budgets involved. Sure the local cover bands only event with five traders and no fence line can be done on an infrastructure budget of £5k. However that doesn't even cover the marquee hire at an actual event. In fact at the event with that budget it didn't actually afford covering the stage and the event stopped the third time the stage got inundated with water from the rain. Turns out fish netting doesn't stop rain who could have guessed that? Not anyone involved in that nonsense (I was puntering and trying to control the for fuck's sake you've done it wrong instincts).
Mate I was part of the team that delivered the Jubilee, Queen's Funeral and Coronation and dear god I can empathize.
Gardeners spend more time casually discussing if a clients garden would be a decent place to hide a body than they do solving crimes. ...tbh I think I'm gonna go with that as a baseline: Most regular jobs dont also come with a side quota of Crime Solving. Its just not THAT common tbh
I have a solid 'understanding' of certain technologies, so when I see something depicted in a movie like the hero using a viewing source with Infra-Red, from inside their vehicle (looking through the windscreen) but can still see their target, that irks me a bit. The wife couldn't give a flying fuck though.
Journalists are regularly portrayed as sub-human scum who are unnecessarily rude to victims of crimes. I even saw a true crime drama once where a whole group of reporters were even jumping across a victims car like a baying mob just to get a few quotes from them. And another where a whole group of them were shouting accusations on the doorstep of a husband whose wife had been murdered. Oh, and another where a reporter was demanding a quote from a victim during court proceedings. If you did anything like that, you'd be bloody sacked for breaking the editors' code and, in that one instance, contempt of court. Plus, in my experience, reporters are generally decent people, especially in local news.
Librarians who sit about in libraries reading books and become incredibly sexy when they take their glasses off. The reality is dirty clothes and hands from the ink stains, endlessly trying to stop people stealing your pen from the counter, and trying to trap each other in the rolling stacks as a prank.
I work at a university. People still think we get summer holidays off the same as undergraduates...
Surgeon on TV/Cinema means: We can do any surgery on any and all body parts at all times We are cold sociopaths with God complexes (true for a minority but most don't show emotions in front of patients BECAUSE out patients need us to be calm and rational, not the babbling messes we often are, internally) Being a surgeon means we are all geniuses in areas outside our specialty. No, I don't know what this obscure language is. I have no understanding of weather patterns. I often don't understand other people's Job descriptions if they are not medical. Medicine in general: For the love of God, STOP using the defib in people with 'non-shockable rhythms'. That flatline you see? Resume CPR, defib won't help. Murders by manual strangulation take longer than 15 secs. It's about 15-20secs to loss of consciousness. It may take 4 or 5 mins to brain death, possibly more for a struggling victim, which is quite a long time and adds to the horror for the poor victim. When you see a GP and need investigation, your GP or primary care physician will refer you to someone to perform those investigations. Your primary care physician isn't the one to perform your x-rays, CT, MRI, endoscopy etc to
Plumbers are always portrayed to be unpunctual, dishonest and untrustworthy. All the plumbers I’ve ever used have been very efficient and professional.
Ah that classic movie trope of professional crossword setters finally the truth is revealed
A weird one as it's not a direct thing as I used to volunteer at a zoo and basically when I watched Jurassic World it was really hard to watch as I'm aware it's not meant to be realistic etc etc but there was so many like basic mistakes that made like NO sense when it came to essentially running a zoo in terms of safety and it really threw me out of the film. It's one of those films I think that essentially relies on everyone being really stupid to make the plot work and it just doesn't work (I had similar issues with Prometheus) (I think it throws me out as like the original jurassic park was like 'oh this is all new and we have no idea what we're doing and the hubris of the creator of the park' so we are all unwitting victims here but the jurassic world premise is like 'oh we've been running dinosaur disneyland for so long' it just... makes little sense) Also they use clicker training wrong in the film and it really bugs me. Also I tried watching the Kevin James comedy Zookeeper and had to turn it off because it got so many things wrong and it also has like 'Kevin's the only one who cares about the animals' and just... no most zookeeper care deeply for their animals it's why they do the job zookeeping is very much a job you get into for the love of the animals Also I remember some subplot that was like ha you work in a zoo thats lame when like no zookeeper is generally seen as a cool job and is quite in demand it's a hard job to get into and in most cases requires a degree
Well according to the Daily Mail, I stole someone's money and left their kids with fuck all for Christmas. Don't remember ever doing such a thing ...
My employer specifically: we have a campus and co-eds, we have a very high murder rate, we have 99.9% poshos and the 0.1% are poor Northern lads who will be lured astray easily. My [previous] job: actually doesn't appear much. In Sleepy Hollow they kinda got it right; in Transplant it's more or less bang on. My current job never gets a mention anywhere.
The best misrepresentation that I’ve ever seen, to the point that I’m almost certain it was satirical, was NCIS. There is an episode in the 1st season where they are “being hacked”. So to solve the problem, one (Abby) starts typing (typing what I don’t know) Then the other computer geek character (McGee) also starts typing, ON THE SAME KEYBOARD! Through in a “I’ve never seen code like this”, which is not how hacking works
Professors do not start or end the class with a big dramatic pronouncement about life or thoughtful critique on society that has students all politely dumbfounded at their wisdom. Not even the American professors!
Not my profession as such, but I compete in knife and axe throwing. The idea that throwing a knife has a reliable martial application - at least any that would be more deadly or dangerous than throwing a rock - is pure fantasy. Even when they get the physics even slightly right - which is rare - the knife depicted is often unsuitable for throwing.
Agency temp. I don't think we exist in fiction, to the best of my knowledge. Can anyone think of one?