During the summer after my (IIRC) freshman year at college, I did piecework in a factory, similar to what has been described in other posts… worst job ever, noisy, dirty, and mindless. In addition, I had multiple bosses with mutually exclusive demands, and worked with people who hated their lives and took it out on the summer help.
I had a job working with emotional distrubed children. Most of the shifts were daytime,and we were quite busy and the job was anything but mindless However, one night a week I had to work the overnight shift. I had to be on the unit and awake from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. Usually the kids were quiet and asleep by 10:00 or so, and the rest of the night was pretty quiet and mindless.
I recently started a job as a cashier. I say hi, ring up stuff, ask for their card, and take the total. Out of the seven jobs I’ve had this is by far the most mindless.
I had a job in college that had me correcting the name and SSN bubbles on standardized tests run in elementary school. That was it - the entire job. We’d get the cards the kids filled out and
a. Made sure they bubbled in the correct letter/number that was written on the top of the card.
b. Corrected any “mistakes” the kid had made (if the bubble wasn’t entirely filled in, we had to fill it in).
First day sucked. Second day, I purposely came into work stoned… still sucked. Third day… there wasn’t a third day.
I was unofficially transferred out of the mailroom to the IT department, where I was supposed to be a tech assistant. Only the tech didn’t need much assistance so I was told to put tracking labels on grant applications, which wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the frequent smoker’s hack from the other application handler.
When I was young I worked in a steel factory at the grinder. I would grab a piece, grind the edges off, toss it into a bin and start over.
Had a few others, but that was the first one I thought of.
Hated it.
I cleaned vacated apartments one summer during college. Completely mindless and nasty to boot.
I had a job as a stagehand once. My supervisor was an asshole who was overly impressed with himself despite not realizing that he had no reason to be. I often had to work on some project that was fed to me piecemeal so I never knew what the end product was supposed to be. He’d give me instructions like this:
Asshole- “Go to the tool lockup and get a screwdriver.”
Me- “Flat or phillips?”
Asshole- (heavy sign and eyeroll) “Flat.”
[I return with it]
Asshole- “Now go over to the equipment room and bring back the roadbox with the DX-7.”
[the equipment room was down the same hall as the tool lockup, directly across the hall from it- I get it and return]
Asshole- “now take off the back panel of the keyboard.”
Me- “But the keyboard requires a phillips [grrr]. Let me go get that.”
Asshole- (more heavy sighing and eye rolling)
…and on it would go like that. I wanted to scream “Just tell me what you want done and go away- I can do it much more efficiently than you, you big stupid oaf!” One time I made a suggestion that would have saved a particular project about two hours of work for three guys, and his response was “Don’t think- I’m not paying you to think. Just do it. Now get back to work.”
I wanted to bash my head against a wall. Which, had I done it, would have made the work day much more bearable as I’d be on a level playing field with my supervisor.
That matches my experience of the most mindless job I ever had – spreading birth control pill packets on an assembly line (temp job). Get 'em out of a box and spread them out straight and even against a rail. The machinery would put them into individual cases and the cases into a box for shipping. No talking, no radio, no anything. Truly oppressive; I lasted only the allotted two weeks. AFAICT, full time employees stayed because they were (relatively) well-paid with good benefits.
But “mindless” wasn’t the worst job I’ve had; worse than that was a warehouse stock-picking job. It required just enough attention that my mind couldn’t wander – given a general bin location (which was often inaccurate), locate the product by SKU, determine how many boxes were needed, load the required amount on the pallet, then on to the next product. Truly mind-numbing.
My penultimate job in the Air Force, while waiting for reassignment orders, was to sit near a teletype machine and wait. Every hour on the hour it would produce one weather report. I tore off the report and took it to the control center’s OIC. I did this for about 6 months.
Mindless, I don’t know, boring yes. Hey, typical government job. I did get to do a lot of reading though between weather reports. Other than the OIC who was in the control center I had no boss. Since he wasn’t really watching me I could do anything between weather reports.
Putting away books at the library. The library assistants already put the books on the cart in the correct order in the sorting room, we just needed to shelve them. After a while, it turned into a game of ‘see how many books you could carry at one time’.
I also proofread online course materials at my tech school. It was a job they didn’t actually need, but the government was throwing money at them to make a student job over the summer. Most of the time it was boring. Since they were online materials, I also had to check if the links were valid. The ‘highlight’ was the nursing course that linked to Google Images for various genital maladies. Ooooh, a va-jay-jay with a yeast infection!
I worked the back room at a small retail store when I was 21. All day, packing, shipping, gift-wrapping. That’s it. It was pretty fun at times, though, because my co-workers were a laugh riot, and the boss bought us lunch (good lunch!) everyday. If I were there by myself, I probably would have jumped off a bridge. Or quit.
I had a job in a typing pool one summer. This was in the old days (when dinosaurs ruled the earth) and before photocopy machines were in use. We were required to be in the room by 8:00 AM (not 8:01, mind you, and the owner of the place had nothing better to do than make sure of this). A bunch of dictaphone tapes would be waiting and we would listen on earphones and type out the contents. There had to be SEVEN carbon copies (anybody else remember carbon paper?), so one tried to type carefully or risk having to carefully correct all 7 copies. That continued non-stop until a 15 minute mid-morning break during which we ate doughnuts. Continue until a one-hour lunch break, and then repeat for the afternoon. We could not leave until 5:00 PM, (not 4:59) on pain of not being paid for the last quarter hour. I gained 15 pounds that summer.
I was a package handler on the night shift at UPS for a few months after college, loading semis. It sucked. The worst part was, I wasn’t even particularly good at it. You’re supposed to double-check the destination of each package to ensure it belongs on “your” truck, but for the life of me I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering, and half the time I’d miss the test packages they’d send down the chute to keep us on our toes. My reason for leaving, as I put it on a later job application: saved up enough money to go to Belize…
As someone mentioned above, the one pro to this kind of work is that it whips you into ridiculous shape.
Stocked shelves at Safeway for a few years. One of those strange dichotomies where both time stands still while you’re doing it while simultaneously you never have enough time to finish. And of course you come in the next day [night] and have to start over again.
I worked in a steel muffler factory for three weeks when I was just out of college. I had a weekend shift of 11 p.m. to 11 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights. Can you think of anything worse for a 21-year-old party girl than giving up Friday and Saturday (and let’s face it, after that shift, Sunday too) nights? Nevermind the job.
They were tiny little steel mufflers, some no more than a foot long. I was told they were “mufflers for heat exchangers.” I do not know what a heat exchanger is, nor why it needs a muffler. I had one of three jobs.
Task 1:
- Open enormous box of muffler parts.
- Insert stem into muffler.
- Lay assembled muffler on line.
- Drop little bits of braise on joints.
- Repeat steps 2-5 for 12 hours.
Task 2:
- Wearing very heavy duty gloves, pick up white hot muffler off line after it’s been through the oven.
- Shine penlight down tube into muffler.
- Look for any bits of braise that did not melt or seal properly.
- If I found one, toss it aside. Put properly braised mufflers back on line.
- Repeat steps 1-4 for 12 hours.
Task 3:
- Pick up only now red hot muffler from line.
- Place in box.
- When box is full, seal box with packing tape.
- Carry sealed box over to pallette and set it down.
- Repeat steps 1-4 for 12 hours.
I coped by:
•Making up song lyrics in my head.
•Composing novels in my head.
•Talking shit with my co-workers.
•Zoning out.
I did this for three weekends and it wasn’t the job that made me quit, it was the hours. I’d have been fine with 8 hours. I’d have been fine with 3rd shift, or 2nd shift, or even 1st shift. I was NOT fine with 11 p.m. Friday to 11 a.m. Saturday and 11 p.m. Saturday to 11 a.m Sunday. Nothing sucked more than that and I was also a nurses’ aide one summer and wiped butts for a living. I would wipe asses any day of the week over the inspect-steel-muffler gig. :: shudder ::
:::raises hand:::
I once worked a temporary job sending out newsletters for some police organization. The newsletters were brief, four or five pages. According to how many were ordered, you would grab a stack, fold a cardboard blank around them, tape them up, and pass them on to someone else to address. And that’s ALL I did. I would have walked out the first day, but only had $100 or so to my name at the time.
I gift wrapped stuff one Xmas season. I don’t like to remember it.
I’ve also stocked grocery shelves. Zombie job.
I remember carbon paper. I even remember punch cards for IBM machines.
Yay! That’s what I do now!
I archive financial records for my company - removing staples and orienting every sheet of paper or check stub to the top center, running them through the scanner, electronically filing them, and reading online the whole time. I average 700 read items per day in my RSS reader, plus 3 message boards that I follow regularly (here, EtiquetteHell, and ThePsychoExWife). Depending on who has turned in stuff for me to process, I may run out of stuff to read and I head over to FreeJinger and CustomersSuck, or the Baen Free Library for a book. I can’t listen to music during regular business hours, because everyone else here gets tons of phone calls, but I work odd hours and listen to music until people show up or after they’re all gone.
If I am sick and read at home, instead of while working, it takes me 6+ hours to read it all.