I had this exact temp job, but for a mining/oil company. In addition to the phone that didn’t ring, there was a bank of elevators which, if anyone got off–and nobody did–I would call someone to let that person in through one of the four locked doors (NSEW) off the reception area.
I wasn’t suppose to read at the desk, but I had a typewriter. That was 80 pages a day on my novel. But it was all so creepy I only lasted two days. (Too bad, another week and I could have been done and into revisions.)
As a field archaeologist the worst outdoor job was trowelling back, scraping the exposed surface so as make any features clear. If it was a freshly exposed bit you got to do a bit of levelling, when making it pretty for a photograph you skimmed off as little as possible. Generally if a large area was involved, a newly opened trench say, we’d form a line. The only way to make it interesting was to have races. The best way for a supervisor to get us to get the work done was to tell us we could go home as soon as it was finished.
The boredom of troweling back pales in comparison to marking pottery. Every little bitty bit of broken pot has to marked with a five or six digit number in pen and ink. I only lasted a week at this and whikle not particularly OCD I was well into developing an obsession with the number 7.
I worked as a Binderer in a print shop. It was right after I’d broken up with ‘the first love of my life’…my first real, long term girlfriend. The mindless repetition was actually pretty good.
Two piles of paper, 750 each. a tub of goo to moisten my fingers, step one, pick up folded sheet, step two, scoop inside sheet inside, step three, place on a new pile. repeat
You remembered the first 20 or so, and the last 20 or so, but it didn’t matter if you did 200 or 20000, you never remembered the middle part.
Blueprints. Cutting Business cards, drilling holes in paper, making pads with glue, filing artwork. Not a bad couple of summers.
I worked for an inventory company once. We went into various stores (WalMart, Safeway, etc.) after hours and counted absolutely everything in the entire store. Each person was assigned an aisle and you just walked very slowly down it for the rest of your shift. The procedure was to scan the barcode on the first thing of whatever item with a handheld scanner thing, then count the number of that item that were on the shelf and type it into the scanner.
Beep. Count, count, count. Type in number. Shuffle two inches to the right. Beep. Count, count, count. Type in number. Etc.
We usually started at 9 or 10 pm and worked until we were done (usually 6am-8am). The manager was an asshole who was constantly breathing down your neck and would absolutely flip his lid if he found out you had counted the cans of regular mushroom soup with the cans of reduced sodium mushroom soup. We were not allowed to speak to each other or to listen to music or (in general) to take breaks. We also, inexplicably, had to wear uniforms even though literally no member of the public ever saw us. We got one 1/2 hour lunch break although it was anyones guess when we’d get it. Smokers got a 5 minute break once an hour though. Never have I been more tempted to take up smoking.
I lasted almost 3 months, which is still amazing to me. That was the only job I’ve ever had that I quit without notice, and fairly spectacularly - halfway through a shift one night I just decided that I had had enough, basically told the manager to shove it, and walked out. Soooo satisfying.
Oh yes, I remember carbon paper, but the most I had to produce at one time was triplicates… You’re talking about putting 13 sheets of paper in the machine at a time, all the time!
Actually, most jobs that I’ve worked have been pretty mindless.
My first was as a street sweeper at Six Flags. Eight hours of swishing up and down the funnel-cake, chewing gum, and vomit-laden streets of an amusement park every day. Occassionally an errant dollar bill on the ground or a person asking for directions would break the monotony, but pretty much my brain was on automatic all day. While country and western music looped in my head all day. (God, if a job ever called for an iPod, that was it. But alas, they had yet to be invented).
I also worked in the mailroom at my university. Stuffing boxes, tossing out incorrectly addressed mass mailings (or keeping some of them, if they were magazines), typing out change-of-address labels. Because it wasn’t physically intensive and sometimes the conversations could get lively, it wasn’t so bad. Plus, it was just part-time summer work.
I worked as a kennel attendant one summer as well. After a while, all the dogs and cats just blur together into one amorphous furball that constantly poops and pees, and occassionally “acts out”. It’s a miracle that job didn’t take away my love of animals.
I worked in a poultry factory, where I spent 8 hours each day making flat cardboard into boxes. Got fired for dropping acid and directing a version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with chicken carcasses. Was better than that Luhrmann thing anyway.
Oh, and I worked in a tiddlywink factory - but it was counter productive.
(sorry)
Many years ago I worked in a Brussels sprouts frozen food plant. Brussels sprouts would come down a conveyor with women on both sides picking out bad ones. At the end of the conveyor, the brussels sprouts would fall into a, oh, 3’ by 3’ by 3" metal tray. A woman was standing at the tray “smoothing” the brussels sprouts into the tray. When the tray was full, she would push the full tray to the side (weighing 40 or 50 pounds at this point), simultaneously pulling an empty tray under the conveyor. It would only take about 30 seconds to fill up a tray.
My Job? Stand next to the woman. When she pushed the full tray to the side, I had to pick up the tray and put it into a 5’ tall rack. Full racks disappearing and empty racks appearing were not my job.
For 8 hours a day, I’d pick up a tray, put it into the rack. That’s it.
Oh, did I mention that the sprouts were wet and the trays had holes to let the excess water drain? So that within 15 minutes, even with water protection gear, I was soaking wet? And that, while the processing area did have a roof over it, there were so many open (large) doors that the temperature inside matched the temperature outside – and that I was on the night shift? And did I mention the smell?
I lasted about a week. That was over 30 years ago and I haven’t eaten a brussels sprout since.
J.
I have had entire boring jobs, and boring parts of jobs =)
being grabbed from my normal gig in the machine shop to help paint 500 150# ammonia gas cylinders this funky medium slightly sparkly blue, took me 3 days
manually sandblasting several thousand half inch alloy B bronze cylinder valves after disassembling the stem assemblies out of them, then after the valve bodies got renovated, putting them all back together again with new packing.
overnight security in a bank operations center with a reputation of being haunted. We used to almost look forward to kids in the neighborhood trying to break in just for something different from walking a complete [15 minute] round every hour. I came up with 13 different ways to knock the place over without getting caught.
Working as a temp, numerous times the ASPCA publicity office asked for me to come and stuff envelopes. Lovely people but seriously mind numbingly boring work. I was one of the few people who could do it without going insane I guess.
At times, forensic accounting was pretty mind numbingly boring - column after column of numbers start blending together after a while, so the nice irregularities were nice to find, because then you could start tracking the issue down and stop going over the damned spreadsheets.
I’m another person who has had a heap of boring jobs, but by far the worsy was checkout operator. The computerised register even works out the change for you, so there is no thinking at all. & we weren’t allowed to moved off our seat.
I felt like a battery hen.
Please note that I’m smiling with you, or at you, or whichever one means “I wish you well, but this makes the corners of my mouth turn upward.”
Am I the only one who thinks these sound kind of fun?
I spent my senior year of high school working at a printed circuit shop.
I often had the joyful honor of trimming the finished circuit boards:
[ul][li]Pick up a circuit board from the endless stack of untrimmed ones.[/li][li]Attach a template to it, using pins that fit in some of the board’s holes.[/li][li]Run the edge of the template against a small guide pin in an industrial router as the blade trims the rough board.[/li][li]Toss the board on the stack of finished ones.[/li][li]Repeat all day long.[/li][/ul]
There was a shop vac hose mounted right next to the router bit, but that really didn’t keep the clouds of fiberglas dust from filling the room. I learned to use Palmolive dish detergent to wash my arms and hands after a shift—the guys said that was the way to stop the itching.
They taught me to wrap my fingertips in masking tape to protect them from the abrasiveness of the unfinished boards as well as to provide a very thin “last chance” if my fingers should stray near the cutter. Surprisingly, I bumped into the router blade a few times and was never hurt.
We wore hearing protectors and dust masks. To combat the boredom, I stuffed earbuds inside the hearing protectors and listened to Pink Floyd on my cassette player all day long.
I kept the player encased in a Ziplock bag, but the players never lasted more than a couple of months before succumbing to the fiberglas dust.
I imagine my lungs weren’t too happy there either.
Probably =)
Scraping down and painting cylinders in august instead of sitting in a nicely air conditioned machine shop, not quite as fun as it sounds.
Sandblasting is loud when you are snuggled up to a cabinet blaster, so you cant listen to music, you have to use hearing protection, and it gets really boring really fast. Series D 186 valves are honestly not that interesting. The most fun I had was actually designing a testing rig to test multiple valves at once when the Chlorine Institute was working on finding a replacement packing material and I tested every damned variant they came up with for about a month. I do sort of worry now and again, I spent a number of years working with asbestos/graphite packing before the industry changed over to P.T.F.E. [teflon] not to mention litharge [lead monooxide] chlorinated hydrocarbons and various iterations of blaster media. No matter how careful you are, you will get exposure.
The most mindless job I can recall was when I was a temp (why is it temp jobs seem to be the most mindless…;)), working in a factory that dealt with chemicals to clean medical equipment. I didn’t work with the chemicals, but instead with the packaging.
One station took flat cardboard boxes and set them up and either stapled or glued them so they stayed open. The next station took a flat plastic bottle and used an air compressor to inflate it so it stayed open (think of the collapsible wine bottles in boxes). Another station filled the bottles, and finally workers at a station screwed caps onto the bottles.
While the tasks varied, so you wouldn’t be simply opening boxes all day (or at least permanently), none of those tasks require much in the way of brainpower.
I’m still a bit leary about cucumbers … we cleaned, rubbing them up and down with green scratchy pads, then sized them into boxes. A number ten was about average, ten in a box. If you found a particularly nice looking one, you’d present it to the other workers for a second for a smirk. We had to be careful though, I was working with a bunch of Greek gypsy women and we couldn’t let the men in on our little joke!
Pickup, scrub scrub, weigh weigh, box.
I also stuck small coins on cigarette boxes for vending machines with small pieces of sellotape.
For the past four years, I’ve worked at the same mind-numbing job of cleaning restrooms at an aluminum smelting plant.
I have 94 restrooms that I have to check/clean/stock every night. After about the fourth or fifth restroom, my mind shuts down and I’m on autopilot til I’m done.