You Do WHAT?

"What's a voiceover?"

That's a question I commonly hear when people ask me where I work and I reply with, "I'm creating a demo so I can do voiceovers."

Then I explain. Voiceovers are in commercials, movies, audiobooks, voicemails, technical guides, video games and lots more. When you hear a recorded voice playing over video or music or not attached to a body, that is a voiceover.

When you're a kid and you ask your friend where her dad works, she normally knows where. What his job entails, though, is an entirely different matter. "What does he do?" I'd ask.

"Uh, something with computers. I don't know," would be the clueless answer.

Since my dad was a painter and decorator, I had no comprehension how a person couldn't know exactly what their mother or father did all day at their job. It was never a mystery to me what my dad did, so why should anyone else have such vague answers about the topic?

The older I get, the more I realize how much I really don't know about different careers. The various industries offer huge worlds full of words and tasks foreign to any other industry. Some workplaces have so many acronyms in their every-day speech that an outsider could not understand a conversation. Sometimes even an employee's position title doesn't make sense.

What about you? Do you have a job you have to explain whenever someone asks? Or do they just pretend they know what you're talking about?

"Oh, you're a debubblizer! Cool!"