© Santosh Subramanian – Some rights reserved - Under Creative Commons

Thursday, February 26, 2009

In Layman's Terms...

On our way back from school, walking to the parking lot...

Me: How was your day baby?
Baby: It was fun, Dad.

M: What did you do in school?
B: We played in circle time

M: And then?
B: Shared my little Ariel toy during show & tell... And I passed it around for everyone to touch & feel it...

M: And then?
B: then... we practiced for our concert, we sang the speckle frog song....
(I don't know what on earth is a speckle frog!!!)

M: And then?
B: then.... we played the freeze dance and... Kavi is not my best friend...

M: Oh! why?
B: Because he pushed me...

M: So what did you do?
B: I said... stop it... it is not nice to push friends...

M: okay...
B: So, what happened in Office?

M: I was working in the office
B: what work did you do in the office?
(Where is this going!!??)

M: Well, I attended meetings, wrote emails, talked to people
B: And then?
(This is definitely not getting good...)

M: And I attended more meetings...
B: You already said meeting, what else?

M: And I worked on documents (trying to simplify spreadsheets & proposals)
B: That's Mama's work, she writes documents...
(aahh... so a similar talk had happened on the other side too...)


M: OK, but I too have to work on documents
B: What work do you do with documents?

M: Well, Baby, do you like this song? Do you want to sing along?..
(We are already in the car by then and the stereo starts playing when I started the car...)

There was a time when I grew up in school where I used to think what do so many people do developing banking software while all that a bank does is to keep your money & give it to you when you want it... And later when I joined one of the German banking giants as a software developer, I realized that 'retail banking' is only a very small portion of the larger business called 'Banking'...

And another one was that - a company/factory would have an engineer who helped make the machinery (my understanding of engineering was only mechanical... LOL), so what do all other engineers do for a living?

How difficult would it be to explain what you do for a living? - in layman's terminology.
Does anyone want to try it out?

4 comments:

Dhanya said...

ha ha
"I never knew what an engineer did for a living when I was a kid. I still don't."

Santosh said...

Precautious situations... [:)]

Seema Menon said...

Santhosh:
That song is,
''Five little speckled frogs
Sat on a hollow log
Eating delicious bugs
Yum.. Yum''

you silly dads!

Santosh said...

@Seema;
Ahem ahem... LOL

Yeah, I figured it out later. check this one... http://paadamudra.blogspot.com/2009/03/fairy-tale-concert.html