Duplicate Trope: What Exactly Is His Job

Do those ever work?

Sometimes they do in fact.

It could only help.

edited 2nd Jun '13 10:36:43 AM by Rethkir

They don't... hurt. But they don't really seem to prevent misuse. In my opinion, their most valuable contribution is that when misuse is pointed out, they make it easier to figure out the correct trope.

So, on the up side, it may help. On the down side, it may not help, but also won't harm.

Oh yes, it should definitely be done, but we shouldn't put all our eggs in that basket, so to speak.

@23 probably falls under The Main Characters Do Everything.

At any rate, I updated the sandboxes with that line.

Sandbox.What Exactly Is His Job

Sandbox.Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation

I think the main problem is that WEIHJ needs a new name.

Fuzzy Character Role?

@32 - I see where you're coming from, and my quick answer is to read the Real Life folder of WEIHJ. There are Real Life jobs that cover "do anything you're told", and Paying Their Dues means that a lot of Hollywood is familiar with the trope, and will write characters that reflect that. The job description is vague to make sure no matter what comes up, it's someone's job, in contrast to more specialized jobs.

Torchwood's Ianto Jones is an excellent example of "does everything else", with the extra lines relating to real world examples.

Isn't that just Jack of All Trades?

EDIT: Oh, wait, I see what you're saying. Interesting trope angle.

edited 2nd Jun '13 6:24:21 PM by StarSword

That's skill-set, not job description, I think.......

So we can just launch the sandboxes and perhaps check the wicks and we are done, or what?

I identified four divisions, where two overlap, and one has no place, currently.

"character has a role in the group, but no one knows what it is" and "character is employed with the group, but no one knows what they work on" are both WEIHJ, "character works somewhere, but no one knows where it is or what they do" is OOO. "A job has a nebulous description because the employee does every job" is neither trope, but may (or may not) be tropeable on its own; it's probably worth running through YKTTW.

And the initial write-up on ykttw could use the pre-sandbox version of both tropes to compile some examples.

So we swap from sandboxes, wick-clean, and put a ykttw to cover the fourth category, right?

As soon as the ykttw is made, we can close this thread?

"A job has a nebulous description because the employee does every job"? Huh, I am not clear on what that is.

That would be when a character is a Jack of All Trades who does whatever needs to happen, so ends up with a job title like "Operations Facilitator" or something that's ridiculously vague.

Here's the examples I'm talking about. The jobs below cover broad areas of work. The character/person may be doing a lot of work, but the job description would cover a lot of activities. Often left vague.

• Ponder Stibbons (who does all the things that need doing, including distracting Ridcully from asking what, exactly, everyone else does). It's revealed in a short story (link to recap page should go here) that he has dozens of job titles, because he does all the work.
• Ianto Jones of Torchwood. Jack introduces him to a new staff member as being the person who "cleans up after us and gets us everywhere on time...and he looks good in a suit."
  • Ianto pretty much did everything that was not being taken care of by the more specialized members of the team. This made his job description extremely vague but it actually gave him a lot of power. He was the team's logistics officer, office administrator and maintenance officer. The other team members have more specialized areas of expertise but their job descriptions are also fairly vague.
    • There actually are job titles for a role like that; 'adjutant', 'aide-de-camp', and 'administrative officer' are three of them.
  • Fanon has made him the team's archivist, and canon would seem to support this, given how Ianto is the go to guy for all the Torchwood-specific information neither Owen or Tosh specialize in acquiring. He also keeps a written diary.
• Jonathan Creek has an extremely vague job title (either "production consultant" or "creative assistant", depending who you ask), and is apparently a combination of director, stage manager and general designated person with some common sense. Whatever Adam is paying him, it isn't nearly enough.
  • A major part of his job is designing Adam's illusions (that would be the "creative assistant" part).
• During the sixth season of The Guild, Codex gets a job at the Game's offices. Her exact job title was left unspecified, though at one point she was described as the "Creator's Left Hand", whose duties were never actually specified, but primarily seemed to consist of doing whatever her boss told her to do, staying out of everybody else's way, and keeping her boss from doing something stupid while he was having one of his frequent panic attacks.
• Some restaurants have someone, called a "roundsman" among other names, who floats from station to station during peak hours helping out where needed. At slower times their presence can resemble this trope.
  • At Thomas Keller's restaurants The French Laundry and Per Se, they added a secondary sous chef who would work the pass or float around as needed during busy periods, and otherwise just stand around. The cooks began calling it the 'SAS,' for Standing Around Station, but when Keller asked what it meant he was told Second Assistant Sous, liked the acronym, and made it official. So, to this day, somebody is always scheduled to the Standing Around Station, which can be very much this trope.
• There is a job called a "Gofer". This person has no one single defined job, but does anything that needs to be done. Depending on the person they report to and what the project is that they're working on, this person can serve as a personal assistant, sound board operator, even an unofficial second-in-command.
• Who hasn't seen an advertised job opening with the disclaimer "... and other duties as assigned." tacked on the end?
  • This is generally the lot of a circus roustabout. Circus contracts usually include the passage "Employee will make himself useful as needed", which amounts to "If the boss comes up with a job, you do it". Circus workers refer to getting forced into random, meaningless labor as "working Chinese" (after the exploited Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad).

I think that's just an unspecified job description, but it's not really unknown. Sort of like Girl Friday. It's not fuzzy what she does, but it is fuzzy exactly what she does.

edited 11th Jun '13 10:11:45 PM by AnotherDuck

#43: Not quite. I still think that a rename of What, Exactly, Is His Job? is still in order.

Granted, we may need a mod's help to redesignate this topic or to quick-start a new one for that Trope.

edited 11th Jun '13 10:25:51 PM by DonaldthePotholer

Yeah, he's talking about splitting it out from the What, Exactly, Is His Job? and Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation because it's not quite the same as either.

edited 11th Jun '13 10:28:20 PM by NativeJovian

You got it, Jovian.