Before the melancholia debilitated me, I worked a long time as an unguilded teamster.

For sure they'd understand. My job had been around for quite a while (not a hooker)

Lots of "I use magic to do magic stuff" for talking to people not long after the Salem witch trials.

Yes.

I solve problems related to how lightning rocks talk to each other. Often there's an issue with how automatic scribes decide they don't feel like talking. Some days I must travel more than double the speed of your fastest horse using a metal box with wheels. I will often complain when my metal box picks the wrong music to play.

I'm a math nerd at the head of a math department for a big company. Pretty sure they still stoned math nerds to death then so I'd lie.

I'm an artist, so probably. I do traditional painting, something they'd get immediately, but my digital stuff would be difficult to explain. They'd probably think my subject matter is weird, but they'd certainly be able to identify my work as art.

I work with a number of shops (all belonging to one family) to try to make sure that we send enough stock from the company's warehouse to them.

Yeah I'd say that's a simple one .

I make energy (a word describing the measure of the invisible magic which makes sea waves happen, the sensation of warmth of the sun on your skin, and the effort you put into lifting heavy rocks) move around really, really, really fast, and lots and lots of it too.

Controlling this 'energy' is a difficult task because if you give it even a little chance, 'energy' will escape in the easiest, most useless way possible. Half my job is planning how to prevent energy from escaping without doing something useful first.

Someone else makes a complicated tools for teeth doctors to record what they do and helps them keep track of how much money they are owed.

I teach people to use that tool, and fix it when it breaks. Usually both because I'll try to explain how to do something and realize it's broken half way through

I make machines talk to each other so that people can talk to each other through the machines from really far away. Like, you know that brand new thing called the telegraph? Well now we call those optical telegraphs because ours are made of pieces of lightning called electricity, and I work on even better versions of that. You can talk to anyone you know instantly with the machines I work on, no matter where in the world they are.

in 1730 they invented magazines, pretty much most tech and communications jobs are based off of that

I'm just going to call myself an artist of new media types and end it there.

They probably wouldn't understand what a software engineer is. I would explain to them that we have mechanical devices that are so complex that humans have to write instructions on how it behaves. That's probably not enough, but would be enough for them to ask clarifying questions.

Books