Assume you had to do a menial job of some kind for the rest of your life (I dunno, maybe you fathered a million and one kids and any income would be stole off you by evil former girlfriends who would just take the cash out of the ATM to eat it [yes, the money, in note form] in front of your starving children if you paid it).
What would you do?
Personally I would become a motorcycle courier because I should imagine that that is great fun. Second choice is a bouncer at a strip club, for obvious reasons.
Newspaper delivery or night-time security guard. The main appeal is that because of the hours you probably don’t have to deal with a lot of obnoxious customers in your face.
What’s menial? I don’t consider any of the real jobs mentioned so far as menial. Low pay? check. Low status? check? Shitty deal all around? Check.
Menial? Not even close. To my eye, it ain’t menial unless you’re getting dirty doing something which takes near zero skill. If you can master it in one shift, it’s menial. Like janitor. Or cesspool sucker-outer.
If I had to do something like that, I’d work a landscape crew. Drive a lawn mower, mulch trees, plant shrubs, weed whack; that sort of thing.
I was going to suggest carpentry, but that can’t be learned in a day. I’ll bet I could learn how to control one of those monster earth movers that dig stuff up from here, rotate it and put it down there. That would be fun.
I don’t think motorcycle courier is especially menial, but if that were an option, I’d go for that.
Working the grill in a busy restaurant. I did this in my 20s and I was really good at it. I kind of daydream about getting a place to let me try it once or month or so on a busy Friday night.
Yeah, most of what people have mentioned is not at all menial work. The skilled trades are not menial labor - nor is bartending, or even being a cook somewhere there aren’t diagrams of how burgers go together. Menial labor is fast food, or floor mopping, or something like that. Maaaaaaybe store clerk, but when I hear “menial labor” I think more of things that you have to take a shower when you get home to wash the ditch digger off you.
Laundromat attendant. Heck, I’d even load and unload other people’s clothes and fold them. Neither mentally nor physically challenging, probably not too dangerous in a reasonable neighborhood, indoors. Yeah, I could probably handle that.
If that’s not menial enough, then driver. I drove a delivery truck for a couple of years. It wasn’t challenging, but it was somehow satisfying. I liked being able to stop at a different place for lunch every day, pop in and do a quick errand where appropriate, and spend a fair amount of time outdoors.