If any of the detectives from Law and Order come in to my bar I absolutely will not remember that random patron from five days ago.

I work in IT so basically everything

You don't need a huge wrench when working with the p-trap under the sink and water wont start spraying everywhere either as drains aren't pressurized.

Sprinklers react to heat, not smoke.

Not all spriklers go off at the same time in most systems. Only the sprinkler heads affected by heat.

The water coming out of sprinklers initially isn't clear but dark, rusty sludge. Sometimes even black as ink.

Click click clickety-click... I'm in! Click click click... okay, I've hacked the corporate security system and unlocked all the doors, click click... here's the floor plan.

Can you disable the cameras?

Hang on... click click... okay you're good.

MRIs

Far too many movies and TV shows use the magnet to cover for their lazy writing by treating it like something that can be turned on and off like a light.

The magnet in an MRI is one of the coolest things in medicine, and writers get it wrong all the time. In the vast majority of cases, it's always on.

In simple terms, an electromagnet works by running a current in a circle and creating a magnetic field. In an MRI, the current is flowing in what is essentially a closed loop of wire. However, in this case the wire is cooled with liquid helium so it becomes a superconductor.

They induce a current in the wire which creates the magnetic field ("ramp up" the magnet). Because it is superconducting, the current doesn't stop. Once it's ramped up, it no longer requires any external power. As long as the current is flowing the magnetic field remains.

There are only two ways to "turn off" the magnet.

One way is to "ramp down". Essentially the opposite process that is used to get it running in the first place. That's what they do if they need to stop it for service.

The other way is to quench the magnet. You hit the emergency stop and vent off the liquid helium. Without the helium, the wire warms and resists the current and the flow stops.

Quenching a magnet is a magnificently dramatic process. Someone hits the panic button, and there is a loud roar as the helium escapes. Clouds of condensation form around the exterior of the building as the cold gas escapes. In the event some construction crew screwed up and accidentally sealed the vents, there could be an explosion from the rapidly expanding gas.

If writers want to use an MRI as a plot device, have an accident and require someone to quench the magnet to save a life. You'd have the immediate drama from the accident and the quench, and then you'd have the long term drama of the hospital trying to figure out where the money to fix the MRI would come from.

https://youtu.be/9SOUJP5dFEg

Hobby: Skydiving

1. Free fall is at most 65 seconds on a normal jump. My personal record is jumping from 28,000 feet and I was in free fall for around 85 seconds. That's it, there is no such thing as a 5 minute free fall, unless you are looking to break an altitude record.

2. If you run up to a skydiver and pull their Pilot Chute (PC) out and throw it into the wind, nothing will happen. The gear is designed to work at free fall speeds. A 10mph wind will not pull the main out. If you pull on the PC bridle hard enough to actually pull the main out of its compartment... You will just have a main parachute in its deployment bag closed by rubber bands, or other method and it will just be laying on the ground. You will also get a well deserved punch in the mouth by more than one jumper. If you pull the reserve handle you will probably get murdered and there will be no witnesses, especially if the hanger was full of jumpers. They will just hide your body and you will have deserved your fate.

3. BASE jumping and Skydiving are as related as Hockey and Figure Skating. Sure there is some overlap, but one cannot do the other without training. Also BASE is an acronym. Building, Antenna, Span, Earth. Bridges fall under Span BTW. No, I am not a BASE jumper, although I have jumped the Bridge in WV. So yeah, I guess I have my S.

4. Yes, wing suites are cool. Wish I had more jumps on them.

5. You cannot talk in free fall. The old movie trope of talking back and forth is simply not possible. How difficult is it to talk in a car with the windows open going down the road at 70mph? Now, remove the windshield and drive the car 120mph...

6. The "parachute not opening" is not even in the top 10 concerns when jumping. The gear works and we jump with two chutes. There is a whole lot of bullshit that can happen before we get to deployment altitude. Not the least of which is just getting to the DZ in the morning. I always considered my drive to the DZ my most dangerous part of the day. Second most dangerous is being in the airplane. I'm actually relieved to exit the aircraft as at that point I have a better chance of making it to the ground safely than the pilot.

About anything to do with computers. Anything.

Movies always show engineers and tech programmers as being young asocial nerds. We're not all young.

I'm an electrician who installs (mostly) commercial electrical systems, including fire alarm systems.

In most cases, pulling a fire alarm pull station doesn't set off the fire suppression sprinklers. The pull station just sets off the alarm and calls the Fire Department. Sprinklers aren't automatically activated. The water in the sprinkler pipes is under constant pressure. Sprinkler heads are just nozzles with a little heat-activated stopper in them. When that stopper heats enough, it breaks and opens the nozzle, allowing water to flow (they can also be broken by fucking with them or hitting them with something). But there's no mechanism that sets off other sprinkler heads when one goes off. Each head needs to be heat activated individually to go off. You see in movies and TV all the time someone pulling a pull station and that setting off sprinklers throughout the entire building, or someone lighting a fire in a small closet and that setting off sprinklers throughout the building. That simply isn't how they work.

(note: there are some fire suppression systems which do have remote activation, but those are not standard. They're usually used somewhere like a data center or a lab where there's extremely expensive stuff that you want to be sure doesn't get damaged. And those systems usually use a fire suppression foam or powder, rather than water.)

Also, the water in sprinkler pipes is NASTY. It's been sitting in those pipes for years, sometimes decades. It gets black and sludgy pretty quickly. It stains/destroys anything it touches.

there's a scene in "Silo" where a character needs to repair a massive steam-powered turbine that is off-balance, scraping at the housing, and heading towards collapse. all fine and we'll, it's sci-fi, so whatever, they can make magic quick fixes to move the plot along.

what really bugged me, for some reason, is how characters started touching the internal components immediately after it powers down - I have to wait for significantly smaller motors to cool off before handling them, especially if they're rotating poorly with a bad bearing, and burning from friction.

Programming.

It's long and actually even longer.

using a red-tailed hawk call whenever a bald eagle is shown

also I like to try and figure out where they filmed based on the birds I hear in the background

They think programmers are super smart and great at maths.

I work in IT so appearently i can just type override to get into any computer system. Cool..

Hobby: Telescopes upside-down or back-to-front, pointed through windows, with aperture caps on, without eyepieces, under heavy light pollution and glare, magically show Hubble-level images of something only visible from the opposite hemisphere.

Job: The Government knows everything about you and any employee can pull up any info on anyone in seconds. Ffs we can't even get two departments to cooperate on a common database format.

One thing that bothers me, and what everyone should know, is proper placement for defibrillator pads if you're using an AED.

It's not 2 pads on the chest, it's one pad on the upper chest (almost shoulder) on one side, and the other pad goes lower on their side. You're trying to have the current go through their heart (not skip over the top of their skin).

The AEDs found in public locations are all very easy to use and all have pictures for the proper placement. Just open it up and it will tell you everything you need to do. Have someone nearby look for one at the same time you're asking someone else to call emergency services.

They should all have razors if you need to get a little hair off (in case the person is especially hairy for one of the pad placements).

Retail workers spending the day doing shenanigans while barely doing any work, I'd kill for time to do some stupid time wasting shit.

Sorry I can't join your impromptu wedding for two workers whose name I forgot.

I was led to believe that shipping crates open up easily with one quick pry of a crowbar. In reality, those things are built with so many nails and screws that it takes more work to tear it down than to build it.

I used to work in organ transplants, and like literally everything related to organ transplants in film or tv is entirely wrong. Every medical drama, even the ones that pride themselves on realism, always try to make transplants and donation more dramatic, which is absurd when you consider how dramatic the reality actually is.

I almost never see accurate sword fights. If they last more than two or three swings, they’re likely wrong. And Achilles jumping at the beginning of Troy was just comical. Footwork is so vital to sword play that leaving the ground is insane. But realistic sword play would be boring as fuck. It would be over in half a second and you would barely see any movement.

The number of people who are "knitting" in a movie or on TV...maybe 40% of them are actually doing it, and that's a high estimate (shout out to Miss Marple!). The rest appear to be wrapping yarn around one of the needles and then moving it vigorously, lol.

it's neither a hobby or a job But the trope that a very complicated, very dangerous situation can be solved by just one person and a gun.

It's unfortunately so ingrained into the Hollywood story lines that people, especially in the US, think that that's reality.

The idea of the rugged individual has destroyed the idea of societal support to the point that some people are actually terrified to ask for help in anyway.

Hobby: Video gaming.

Try to determine what kind of video game a movie character is playing by what they're doing to the controller.

Aside from Mr. Robot, almost every show that features software or computers completely butchers the details. My favorite offender? Mythic Quest. The main cast supposedly runs a massive MMORPG, yet their day-to-day activities have almost nothing to do with how game development or even basic software work actually functions.

It is like if ER was about hospital staff moving random boxes labeled "coils" back and forth while claiming to perform life-saving surgery. That is how far off it feels.

What really gets me is that Mr. Robot proved it is possible to do it right. If you treat the subject matter with respect, you can absolutely make something compelling and realistic. But since it is all just "nerd stuff" to most writers, and none of them are C++ goblins, we get tech scenes written by people who probably think JSON is a fitness drink.

I have not unlocked a single chasity belt, it doesnt even come up as a service they might need.

I started IT thinking it was genuinely telling people to turn their computers off and on again. I feel that's like a 1% though. Most of the times it's actual issues. At my work some stuff is hardware, web, databases and I wasn't expecting this when I first started.

Thanks IT Crowd

TL:DR: Everything? Like, literally everything.

If it's about driving? They're looking everywhere except the road in front of them

Computers? It's cringe, all I will say

Flying? Not even close

Brushing teeth? Put some tooth paste FFS!

Sex, perhaps? As bad as porn videos are at showing realistic sex situations, movies and especially TV shows are typically way worse with all the requirements to not accidentally show a nipple, omg!

Martial arts and fighting? The worst offenders. After twenty punches to the chest that will have broken half of the ribs, the protagonists now suddenly finds the strength in thinking about keeping his little girl safe and now he beats up 20 guys with those broken ribs

Being punched unconscious or getting some chloroform and they wake up the next day? Lolololollll. Humans are notoriously hard to keep them "out" without killing them, it's why anesthetists are paid so well, it's a very complicated job. When you're out from an impact to the head, you need medical attention, you likely have a minor amount of brain damage. If you're out for more than ten seconds, it's brain damage for sure. If you're out for over a minute, you're likely not waking up with full abilities, you're likely going to be a vegetable at best

Okay, doctors then? Saving a patient's life with the buzzer? Yeah no. When the heart stops, that defibrillator won't make it "go" again, the defib actually stops it in case of heart rithm problems. Also, CPR outside a hospital will result in death for about 90% of the cases, give or take, and Har % goes up by another 2 after 3 weeks later. The tiny % that does survive likely will have issues ranging from benign to being a benign vegetable.

If you broaden it a little from job/hobby to living in the real setting of a movie, you'll notice characters going places that make no sense at all. Like if it's Seattle they might start a boating scene on Lake Union and ends up at Mercer Island, swinging by Alki beach on the way.

Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing

It is surprisingly difficult to get into a good dance position, especially for the standard (waltz, tango, foxtrot, quickstep, Viennese waltz) dances. Two actors walk up to each other and it's apparent even before they touch that they have no idea WTF they are doing: they aren't even standing up correctly.

Hobby 2: Chess

Smart guy walks over and absolutely beats the pants off of anyone else playing like 30 seconds after they get taught the rules or from glancing over the shoulder of someone else playing the game. It's all "aha! Mate in 4!".

No way dude. It is way, way not that easy. There's "good at chess" and there's "GOOD at chess". Unless you are part of a very large club or are taking lessons from someone at or above the master level, you probably don't know anybody in the second category. Dr. House is not going to blindfold beat anyone like that.

Call centers: that there is time between calls. That people have time off the phone to form friendships with coworkers.

Handyman: we have sex with clients.

IT: that we can just code anything we want regardless of standards, policies and best practices.

I work at a bank. Every bank heist scene makes me fucking cringe lmao. Why would only one person know the code to something??? Why are safety deposit boxes treated as some super special thing? Daredevil just pissed me off with this so much lol

I don't think I've ever seen my job in a movie. The only place I could imagine industrial embroidery ever showing up on screen would be as the setting for a chase scene or something.

3d printing - it prints flawlessly and the first time.

Gaming.

There is no way that this obvious secret wasn’t discovered until now. If there are as many gamers as you show, it would’ve been found within 2 weeks maximum. Looking at you, ready player one. Cringy McCringeCringe can’t be the only one who found these obvious secrets after literal years.