I’m not talking about being unappreciated at your job, I’m talking about work that is boring, repetitive and dull.
I ask because I was watching the “Pizza” episode of Food Tech. During the dough production process, two workers grabbing balls of dough off a conveyor and put them into a tray. That is all these people did, all day long except for breaks.
[ol]
[li]Grab a blue plastic tray from one conveyor[/li][li]Put a white plastic spacer in the tray[/li][li]Grab eight wads of dough from second conveyor [/li][li]Lift out spacer[/li][li]Place blue plastic tray on third conveyor[/li][li]Repeat[/li][/ol]
According to the narrator, each worker doing this job has to"place" 4000 dough balls per hour. From the pace of the video, if it was humanly possible to make the workers move faster, they would be compelled to move faster. And the only reason that humans do this job is that they haven’t successfully created a machine to do this particular job.
Anyone here done a job like this? How did you cope?
I once ran an aluminum bending machine at a lawn chair manufacturing plant. Pick up poles, place in machine, put hands in appropriate spots where they wont be caught up in metal as it’s bent, press foot pedal. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Mindless AND potentially dangerous AND low-paying.
Also, I worked as an assistant at a print shop, which consisted mostly of a variety of mindless jobs … folding this, collating that, stapling the other. Geesh.
Not quite there, but I’ve had lab tech jobs where I was expected to
accept sample from person,
stick part of sample into machine,
stick pH-stick into rest of sample,
produce numbers.
Whether the numbers were acceptable or not was Not My Job. I was to keep the lab clean, but not to perform calibrations or anything else which would require more than three hours’ training.
The job cleaning a tutoring centre was more complicated than those. Heck, running 400 photocopies (4x100, in different colors) as part of receptionist gigs was more complicated.
My husband worked second shift on a factory line for seven years.
He will complain about the noise, the dirt, the heat, and the complete divorce from evening television. But he really liked the mindless aspect… he was able to think about whatever he wanted to think about, and boy, does the man ever have side projects.
His particular part of the line gave him ten minutes to goof off every half-hour, too, which must have helped.
One of my jobs in the oil patch was pretty mindless. Worked on a pipe-lay barge. For the first few months, my job was to paint numbers on each new joint of pipe while it was welded. Stood there all day with my paint brush and paint can. New number every 4 minutes. 12 hours per day, 7 days per week. I nearly went insane. It was amazing how often you could get distracted and forget which number was next. (Is this #8998, or #8997 ?).
I sometimes have to train people that work on assembly lines, and during launch phases, I have to learn to load parts myself. In our US and Canadian facilities, the production employees typically have ghetto blasters, and the people who don’t want to listen to that are allowed to use iPods and similar. Lots of people listen to audio books, text books, podcasts, and other things to numb the monotony. Sometimes non-skilled, non-line jobs open up, and the smarter ones try to bid into those, because those jobs aren’t as monotonous.
Our Mexico facilities are a lot more strict. No music, no food, no drinks, no nothing. I think what keeps them going is an above-average wage for the type of work that they do. Of course, you could say the same thing about our US/Canadian employees.
I think retail can be pretty mindless…maybe it depends on where you work.
There are some customer situations that require thought, but generally it’s just folding jeans and t-shirts interspersed with, “Hi! May I start you a fitting room?” “That looks so cute on you!” “Are you familiar with such and such rewards program?”
And so on.
I worked retail for 4 years before finally going bananas.
Working the register was fun though…at least I had something specific to do instead of wandering around in circles doing the above.
My very first job was in a factory that produced electronic parts.
All I did was:
Take a little black plastic part out of a bag
Place part under the stamper in my machine
Press my foot pedal once
Check and make sure the number stamped on part was legible
Place stamped part on a tray for baking
I was sixteen and already showing OCD tendencies. I would count my pieces in my head and check my time and estimate how many I would finish in that hour every ten minutes, without stopping the process. I always exceeded quota unless my machine went down. I never even wanted to take my lunch or breaks, but they made me. I suppose this was because of child labor laws if they existed in 1977.
Then I developed a crush on the guy who would fix the machines and couldnt wait for my lunch and my breaks. My machine started going down quite often. He introduced me to marijuana during lunch one day.
My first year there I was very productive, my second year I had a lot of fun.
I have two, and they were both temp jobs. One was counting vials. These boxes of experimental drug would come back, and we had to count the vials. We couldn’t just eyeball them, though. A supervisor walked the floor, and we had to manually count each one. There were sixteen in each - four rows of four. It would have been easy just to eyeball them. She wanted to see our fingers touching each one.
The other one was at a temp job, when I had finished one project and they didn’t have a new one for me. My job then was copying. I would pull these secured files out of a locker, copy them, stamp each one “copy”, and then secure the originals. Maybe, 5 or 6 times a day. The rest of the day? Make random copies and stamp “Copy” on everything available out of boredom.
I once stacked cases of empty beer bottles in a brewery warehouse. Every shift, I’d stack roughly 8000 cases, each containing 24 bottles. They were stacked on pallets, 84 cases to a pallet. The biggest deal was finishing a pallet, when I’d wave at a lift operator to come take it away.
The job was pretty mindless, but its physical demands meant that I was in the best shape of my life.
I worked at a company that made cases for cassettes (yes, this was way back when) and CDs (new!). There’d be two people facing each other across a big table. We’d put the plastic tray into the cloth bags, pull up on the corner to ‘lock’ it in and put it on the conveyer. We’d relieve the drudgery by chatting across the table, listening to music, etc. Naturally the company brought in an efficiency expert and they did away with the tables and everybody got a station and faced the same way so we couldn’t talk to one another. I got moved off the line and drove a truck to get supplies. Then I worked in shipping. Then I got fired.
I once ran a third forming press for V8 engine oil pans. Pick one up from the second press output conveyor, use it to flip the one in my press out to my output conveyor while sliding it on the die, hit the run buttons, and “ka-chunk,” do it again.
It was literally mindless. I’d zone out and the next thing I knew the shift was over and I had no memory of it. It paid well though.
File clerk at a law firm was a bit tedious - wait for someone to call and ask for folders W-15992-1 and W-15992-2, then scurry off to retrieve them. The firm had a brilliant document management system that would tell the attorneys and paralegals that the answers to the first interrogatories for the Smithers case were in such-and-such folder, but it was up to human drudges to actually get the folder. Half the time, I’d get to the designated shelf, only to find an OUT flag showing that the partner who wanted the file already had it.
Fast food was horrible. Seemingly endless assembly-lining of condiments onto the buns - mayo ketchup pickle onion tomato lettuce, mayo ketchup pickle onion tomato lettuce, mayo ketchup pickle onion tomato lettuce…
The absolute worst was a one-day temp gig as a department admin. Eight hours of staring at a telephone, hoping it would ring and bring me some fleeting human contact. This was at a bank’s operations center - I had to look good and professional even though no actual customers could even get into the building, and I wasn’t allowed any human comforts like a newspaper or even a phonebook to read. The phone rang exactly twice. Once at 11:55 when my apparent supervisor called to say I could take lunch at noon, and in the afternoon, there was a wrong number.
If I hadn’t, I’d probably have never found The Dope.
I had a temp job, the responsibilities being: Checking meeting requests for 2 VPs (that usually took me from about 7:00am to about 7:05am), and to be present for 8 hours. That’s pretty much it, besides running out for cookies for the big meetings every once in a while.
Although, $18/hour for surfing the internet was kind of cool for a little while.
I stuffed envelopes as a temp at a mail facility for somewhere between half a year and a year. I’d dream about moving paper at night. There was a lot of cross talk at the tables, though, so it was less boring than it could have been.
90% of my time at work is spent waiting for customer requests or remote hands tickets. I guess you could say that clicking on “New Posts” for most of the working day is pretty mindless.