My Father Doesn't Understand My Job Title
He tells the neighbors I do 'computer work,' and honestly, close enough.
My father has introduced me to his neighbors as an engineer, a typist, a manager of the internet, and once, memorably, as "something in foreign." I am a product operations lead. He is not wrong so much as unbothered.
For years this drove me up the wall and along the ceiling. I would come home for the holidays with my laptop bag and my lanyard still in the side pocket, and within an hour Dad would be on the phone with his brother saying, "Yes, yes, she fixes computers, very big company," while looking directly at me, daring me to correct him. I do not fix computers. I once called our own help desk because my monitor was unplugged.
I tried everything. I tried the elevator pitch. I tried analogies: "Imagine a restaurant, Dad. I don't cook, I don't serve, I make sure the kitchen and the waiters and the menu all agree with each other." He listened to this with the patience of a man waiting for weather to pass, then said, "So you are a waiter," and went back to his newspaper.
Once I drew a diagram. Boxes, arrows, my role highlighted in yellow. He studied it for a long moment, tapped the yellow box... and asked, "And this is the computer?"
The Rotary Phone Theory of Fathers
My father worked thirty-four years at a state electricity board. His job title never changed. His desk never changed. The phone on his desk was a black rotary one, and when the office finally replaced it with a push-button model in the nineties, he brought the rotary home, and it sits in the hallway to this day, heavy as a small dog, connected to nothing. When I was a kid he let me spin the dial while he pretended a call was coming through from the Prime Minister.
That phone did one thing. Everyone who saw it knew what it did. You picked it up, and a person was on the other end, or they were not.
My job, in contrast, is a phone with no dial, no cord, and no obvious ear-hole, and it rings in fourteen apps simultaneously.
I used to think he refused to understand my work.
It took me an embarrassing number of years, and one specific evening, to see that I had it backward.
The evening was a power cut, two summers ago, the whole street dark and everyone out on their balconies like it was 1988. Dad and I sat with the good torch and a plate of mangoes, and out of nowhere he said, "Your grandfather never understood my job either." I said nothing... in the way you stay quiet around a deer or a rare mood. "He was a farmer. He thought electricity was my hobby. He told the whole village I read meters." Dad laughed, wiping mango off his chin in the torchlight. "I sat in an office and planned load distribution for three districts. He died thinking I read meters. It never once made him proud of me any less."
He said that last sentence with the grammar slightly wrong and the meaning completely right, the way he says most important things.
He died thinking I read meters. It never once made him proud of me any less.
Something shifted in me on that balcony, quietly, the way furniture shifts in a house at night.
My father does not need to understand my job.
My job is not the thing he is proud of. The job is just the visible antenna of the thing, and the thing itself is me, alive and employed and calling home on Sundays, and "computer work" describes that perfectly.
What He Actually Understands
Here is a partial list of things my father, who cannot retain my job title, knows with total precision: the name of my difficult colleague, updated across three difficult colleagues over six years, and which of them "has a good heart but a loose tongue." The month my performance review happens, because I go quiet in the weeks before it. The exact sound of my voice when a project is failing, detectable within two syllables of "Hi Dad." He does not know what a sprint is, but he knows when I am in a bad one.
Last year I started writing again in the evenings, poems mostly, which I hid from everyone with the diligence of a person hiding something much more interesting. I had signed up for lessons through an online writing academy, and I was working through the beginner exercises like a woman relearning to swim in the shallow end.
When I finally wrote something worth keeping, it was, to my great annoyance, about him. It is always about them, isn't it? You sit down to write about the sea and your father walks into the poem carrying a rotary phone. I found there is a whole ocean of poems on family, and mine joined it, one more cup of water in the tide, a poem about a man explaining my life wrongly to neighbors with his chest out and his facts sideways.
I never showed him.
But my mother found it, because mothers are a surveillance system with excellent baking skills, and she read it to him one night on the phone while I listened, mortified, from three hundred miles away, having called at exactly the wrong moment. There was a long pause when she finished... Then my father said, "Who wrote this?" Mum said, "Your daughter." Another pause... longer, the kind you could park a truck in.
Then he said, "See. I told everyone. She does something with words and computers."
Reader, he was right.
That is the joke and the whole miracle of it. Thirty years of my job titles, each more syllabic than the last, and the man had it correct from the beginning: something with words and computers. I laughed until the phone got hot against my ear, and he laughed because I was laughing, neither of us fully sure what the joke was, both of us sure it was a good one. Somewhere under all of it I could hear the thing that never needs a job title, the thing the poems on love keep circling and never quite land on, because it does not hold still long enough to be described. It just answers, every Sunday, before the second ring.
Last month a new neighbor moved in downstairs from my parents. Young guy, works in software. Dad called me, delighted. "I told him my daughter is also in computers. He asked what exactly. I said she is a poet who manages the internet." A pause... "He looked very impressed."
I have decided that is my job title now. It is going on the next form that asks.
The rotary phone still sits in the hallway, connected to nothing, and every visit I spin the dial once on my way in. Somewhere, on the other end of nothing, a call goes through.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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