I've noticed a lot of people cite their professions in the arguments that spring up daily on this board. Inevitably, many of these professions cited are military/police, but others are mentioned frequently, cray74 and his job as a materials engineer being one of the more notable examples.

If none of the above fits with what you do, please respond.

None of the above

WHAT IS IT RAAAAGHHHH I'm a student.

I should've put Shadowrunner as a choice.

emo you got MSN AIM or Yahoo?

AIM. Name is ninjaphilosopher.

log on to it
EDIT: Threadjack over,althoughitis looking like one of those Shadowland threads where someone decides they want to talk privately with somebody

All I have to do is hack my time signature and the illusion is complete!!

<Strikes Again!!! Ha-Ha-Ha>

Student/CADmonkey.

~J

Who's the engineer? He's the only guy who hasn't marked himself down as a student or a wageslave.

A few menial jobs, mostly mailroom or warehouse shipping/recieveing.

I null voted. I work in the Transportation industry as an International Freight Forwarder. Sort of a nebulous middleman job and I'm also a DoD Contractor for their Household Relocation Contracts. It's not really a service job, not really a Wage Slave position (I work for a mid size company but in a position where I have actual decision making ability), and not management.

One of the two engineers here. Software engineer to be exact. The majority of my experience so far has been in military avionics, but I will hopefully be in for a slight change soon.

I'm the Professor/Teacher (and the only one, looks like). An English as a Second Language teacher, in case you were wondering.

Are we talking freelancer as in "writer," or as in "freelance security consultant" (aka Shadowrunner)?

I should've put Shadowrunner, but no, I meant "works for FanPro."

I am waiting for the RL shadowrunners to vote or post about it

Web designer/student. I want to get in to *real* programming, but I still have some years of schooling to get through first.

MS?

Being a wage slave is almost impossible here in Texas, which is composed of almost completely at will employers. No contracts means no being trapped in a job you hate. The job you hate may be the lesser of two evils because you prefer it to being broke, but that's a personal choice.

I don't think you understand what "wage slave" means.

~J

I don't think we understand "wage slave" to mean the same thing. What's your definition?

Boring job, cubicle, lots of paper.

Much the same as is found here—a person with no contractual or legal obligation to work for their employer, but without the reasonable ability to quit (whether to their own affairs or another job).

~J

Ah, I pay more attention to the "slave" aspect of it. Wage Slaves require an extraction and/or legal action to quit their job. Normal schmoes don't.

That definition would mean that two corporate employees, both working the exact same job under the exact same contract, would be classified as wage slaves based on whether they had a lemonade stand or not. I disagree with that interpretation, but since it isn't exactly an important matter, feel free to have your own ideas unmolested by arguments from me.

That would include everybody, though, unless you're not counting people who live below their means and save up money.

That definition is pretty broad and open to interpretation. It could mean just about any non-owner in a company, up to and including non family executive officers in a family owned business. While this definition would satisfy a devout Marxist it probably is a bit too broad for society at large. It also seems to be a term only in common use by a certain subset of political radicals (which does make sense in the SR context of Captain Chaos being a neoanarchist) used (derogatorily) to refer to any employee.

Not at all. The "or to another job" is the critical part—we're not talking about people who can't go totally unemployed for five years with no financial difficulties, we're talking about people who can't afford to find another job—whether because their skillset is so specialized that there's only one employer, or because their job leaves them without the time to effectively seek other employment, or because they're bad at covering their tracks and they know they'll be fired immediately if they start looking for another job, or whatever.

If I have a lemonade stand, even if I don't make enough to live on off of that stand, that combined with my savings will allow me to live while unemployed for that much longer. At some point, that length of time becomes enough to allow me to safely look for another job, or train into a different field. As such, it is wholly appropriate that that lemonade stand should make the difference between wage slavery and not.

~J

Wage Slave.

Pivot Tables, Pie Charts, Conference Calls, and Flow Charts.
I publish reports that go nowhere, but get nasty e-mails if they don't get done.
I write processes that will be cast aside every 6 months during a restructuring.
But I do get to troll forums all day, so thats a plus.

kage: I understand your pont of view. I just tend to focus on the more negative side of that phrase when looking through shadowrun goggles. In SR wage slaves don't even have the opportunity to go to another job without getting a corporate lawyer and/or a runner team to extractt hem.

I'm an ethics counselling consultant for a couple of companies in Canada.

What do you do, Calvin Hobbes?

A wage slave is the guy who has a few years with the company and has gotten himself a position in which he can, with overtime of course, cover his overpriced rent, pay his child support, and make his car payment.

Though he is free to leave his job anytime he wants, he literally cannot afford to and still maintain the quality of life he is accustomed to. Essentially he is a slave to the wage his company pays him.

Emo: I help companies make decisions about things that have an effect on people, like what benefits to offer/how much should the company dedicate to environmental concerns/if this process harms townspeople, how much responsibility does the company have, etc. I also set up seminars for my partner to teach things like those annoying sexual harrasment seminars companies have, and other things, but since I am pug-ugly, I'm not usually the face of the company.

I guess it's just my view of Shadowrun then. I tend to focus on the slavery aspect of "wage slave." If you're not living in a state close to that of a slave, you're not a wage slave. BEing important to the operation doesn't grant you more freedom. If anything it will probably curtail it because the bosses will want to keep eyes and ears on you at all times.

Frosty: I'd say that's not a wage slave, that's a comfort slave. Anybody can quit their job at any time. Life becomes much harder, but still liveable. Obviously that disagrees with the general definition of the term as linked to above by kagetenshi, but I'm content to disagree with the masses.

Hmmm... where's the stay-at-home parent option? I get to spend my days teaching two whirlwinds of destruction important things like how to count (using dice, of course), make cupcakes and do kung-fu. Just doing my bit to support Fanpro by creating future roleplayers.

Havig done the stay at home parent thing, I think that qualifies as a combination military / police / lawyer / service industry / professor. Depending on how you look at it and the way the day went the pay either sucks or is infinitely more valuable.

Yesterday on the Colbert Report, there was an article saying that, counting from corporate pay scales, stay-at-home moms deserve $132,000 a year because of the myriad things they do.

I agree. And stay at home dads deserve more. One, men make more money, and two, stay at home dads get no respect at all (which is just slightly less than stay at home moms, but still a noticable difference).

And here I'm all happy just to find a quarter in the laundry! I need to ask for a raise!!!


And yes, while the pay may suck (barring the occasional quarter), the benefits are grand. My kids don't even mind me reading Shadowrun stories to them... (with careful editing-drat those SR4 people for switching to real swear words!!!)

Really! What the frag is up with that drek?

It is NOT hard to substitute "Frag" for "Fuck."

Who said it was? However, "frag" has no social ramifications. Real world swear words do. What that means is that some poor kid somewhere is going to get his shadowrun books thrown away because his fundamentalist mom saw swear words in it. The pseudo-cursing had no detrimental effects on the game world or the game. Actual cursing could.

Sheese! When you're reading outloud, it's nice to not have to 'edit' on-the-fly. And in our family, Sticks and his puppy lived happily ever after.

What else did you edit?

None of the above - I'm currently a research technician in an HIV research lab / grad student to be.

(Took the job to figure out how I'd feel about a career in research and take a little breather after college - a good thing, it turns out, since I found out I hate research and the academia - unfortunately, enlightenment as to what I'd like to do instead has proven elusive.)