Basic Trope: A character (or entire company) has ill-defined job responsibilities.
- Straight: Alice works at an office, creating documents and spreadsheets about the company's sales and productivity. What exactly the company does is never revealed to the audience.
- Exaggerated: Even Alice isn't sure what she does.
- Downplayed: Alice talks about, and is sometimes shown coming home from, a hospital. It's hinted that she's a nurse, or maybe an orderly, but it's never made clear.
- Justified:
- Alice works for the government in a highly classified department. Talking about what she does for a living would violate several national laws.
- Alice lives in a poorly constructed Lotus-Eater Machine. This represents a flaw in the illusion.
- Inverted: Alice is a nurse, but she can't figure out what anyone else at the hospital does.
- Subverted: Alice's friends say they know what she does for a living.
- Double Subverted: When she asks, they all give different answers.
- Parodied: Alice's job is to sit at a desk and guess what it is she's supposed to be doing.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob says he knows exactly what Alice does for a living, but it turns out he's wrong. He asks her to explain, and she does, but the description is so laden with jargon that no one is sure what she just said.
- Averted: Alice has a well-defined job.
- Enforced: The writers purposely keep her job vague, to give them more options for writing material about her.
- Lampshaded: "Come on, Bob. You've known me for five years. You really don't know what I do?"
- Invoked: Bob tells Alice to claim that she's a high-powered executive to impress people, since no one can contradict her on it.
- Exploited: Alice uses the fact that no one knows what she does for a living to make up outrageous stories about things that happened at work that day.
- Defied: Someone asks Bob what Alice does for a living, and Alice tells them before Bob has to confess he doesn't know.
- Discussed: "No one knows what Bob does for a living? Well, find out. That's Alice's thing."
- Conversed: "If this were a sitcom, Alice would be the one who has a job that no one knows anything about."
- Implied: What, Exactly, Is His Job?
- Deconstructed: Alice's friends become mistrustful of Alice because they don't know what she does for a living, and she's unwilling to tell them. This drives a wedge in their relationship, culminating in Bob stalking her to try and find out where she goes every day.
- Reconstructed: Alice, Bob, and the others all make amends, though they still don't know what she does for a living.
- Played for Laughs: Alice tells people that she "synergistically integrates various apparatus to facilitate cross-platform functionality." She confesses to Bob later that she has no idea what that means, it just sounds really impressive.
- Played for Drama: Alice gets fired or laid off, and when she interviews for other positions, she can't explain what she did or how it helped society. Consequently, she's condemned to a long period of unemployment and poverty.
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