Machinist here. Nobody understands what it means, and yet your food would cost much more without us, since food processing plants cannot afford to wait weeks at a a time to order OEM parts from Europe when their lines go down (and they dont generally have the ability to stockpile spare parts for all their machines). They also can't afford to pay decent mechanics who don't fuck things up constantly (they will use a fucking pipe wrench on a shaft that is turned to .0005" under nominal size, marr the surface, and then the bearing won't fit).

Basically if it's made of metal or plastic we can make it-shafts, rollers, and a million other things which wear out over time, and we can make them much more accurate than you can (economically at least) with CNCs, especially for one-off parts.

When your local poultry plant has a machine breakdown at 3am, they call us up to come down and make one right away because their line is down and they have half the plant standing around twiddling their thumbs. Without us they would be fucked.