Let me first stipulate that there is dignity in all labor, and that you gotta do what you gotta do to pay the rent. Not faulting anyone’s choices.
Every day as I pass through the turnstiles into my corporate office building, I feel for the poor schmo whose job it is to sit at the desk and watch us go by. It seems like the highlight of their day is when someone forgets their badge and they have to make a temporary.
We also have a security staff who occasionally man these posts; but (I assume) their job description also includes walking around and rattling doorknobs occasionally.
I once worked the resident intranet helpdesk at my college. It was the place where you called if the internet in your dorm went out, or if you got a virus you could drop off your laptop and we’d run an antivirus on it for you. Problem was, I was working over the summer when we had maybe 5% of the students there. Sometimes we’d go 2-3 days with nobody coming in for help.
Good news was the boss didn’t mind us playing flash games on the support computers as long as we stopped as soon as a student came in. I got really good at DiceWars that summer. I really how the receptionists you’re talking about are at least allowed to surf the web.
Sometimes you get entertainingly crazy phone calls. I filled in at front desk reception numerous times while my agency was struggling to find a permanent hire, and we had one guy who called regularly from the other coast to narrate his morning walk. “I see the mailman…Mr. Johnson is watering his flowers…” and so on.
We also had a woman call us to say that “stars outside earth’s atmosphere” were causing helicopter crashes. Presumably stars INSIDE earth’s atmosphere would have done substantially more damage.
We had a security guard who had to sit by a locked door all day and let drivers in who came to pick up freight. she also had to watch for any issues in the vicinity in the warehouse. Maybe 10 or 15 drivers a day. She couldn’t read, or do any crafty type things or listen to music, just sit and watch the same 6 or 7 people go about their jobs. Other than the drivers ringing the bell for entrance, I can’t recall anything that came up while we were there that needed a security guard. I can’t imagine having to sit like that for 8 hours a day. I would be homicidal.
In the smallish companies where I’ve worked, the receptionist usually has duties other than sitting there and answering the phone. She/he (most often a woman) would order lunch for company meetings, sort incoming mail, handle shipments and do whatever else kept her busy. Sometimes they managed the Outlook calendars for the execs. At one company, the receptionist was entering the expense report for the marketing VP after his multi-country trip to Europe. So she showed me a pile of receipts from various countries, which didn’t specify the currency used. (This was in the days before the Euro.)
That was pretty much what I was going to post. If you think being a receptionist or check-in clerk or something like that is boring, try working full factory shifts on almost any manufacturing or processing line. Same thing over and over again.
Sheesh, it’s got to better than working in some cubicle farm where you see the exact same 10 people. Every day. Every week. Every month. For YEARS! I’ll take people watching and the whack job public any day, thanks!
This a million times over. If you think receptionist is the most boring job imaginable, you have been fortunate in your work experience.
Well - one proviso - you presume people are coming and going. We have a security guard on duty every day. On some days, hours can go by with no visitors. If you were a receptionist at a low traffic location, and didn’t have other duties, AND weren’t allowed to read or surf the net, yeah, that would be pretty boring. But at least it would have the benefit of not being both boring AND physically unpleasant as many jobs are.
When my father was young and unskilled, he was the night guard at a printing plant. Since printing plants weren’t high on thieves target list, he spent every night walking around a deserted plant, checking to see if the same doors were still locked, for eight straight hours.
None of the bad jobs I’ve had even came close to that.
I’ve never been a factory line worker or a receptionist; so yes, I have been fortunate. But I would think that a factory worker is at least doing something, even if it’s repetitive. Sitting at a desk and doing nothing, just hearing the ding of the badge reader for 8 hours, would drive me up the wall.
Just had my last day after 6 years of being the receptionist in a large, busy, international office. Boring does not describe the job at all! My area was the hang out area for the whole floor. There was constantly something to do or someone to talk to. I also knew all the gossip, who was leaving, who was sleeping with who, who was about to be fired…
I always had candy and games on my desk and it didn’t matter how low or high up a person was, they all came and played Rockem’ Sockem’ Robots and ate sour dinosaurs.
I was the one who people came and talked to when they were having a bad day or got a promotion and one of my going away gifts was a personalized mug with Floaty “The Bartender” Gimpy (except my real names on it). It was a great job and perfectly suited to my personality.
I worked as a receptionist in college-the night shift at the library. Students coming in after hours had to swipe their ID to get in. I just sat there and if someone couldn’t get in, I explained they needed to go get their ID and come back; if they then made a fuss I called security (which happened exactly twice). They let me do my homework or read, so it was a great job-got paid to do my homework.
Telefundraising is the most boring job in the world, especially when one works from home. Giving essentially the same spiel, over and over hundreds of times a day to faceless donors who are either joyously happy to hear from you, or pissed off to the max that you’ve even bothered to call takes its toll. At least in an office environment, you get to hang out with all the other freaks doing the same shit.
Thank OG I CAN work from home and play on the intraweb between calls made.
In the automated slaughterhouses I worked in during the 70’s, there was a production line where whole dead pigs suspended by an ankle paraded along. One person’s job was to jam his thumb into the asshole, carve around it with a very sharp knife in the other hand, pull it out a little, cut it off through the intestine, and deftly sling it into a chute that went to the floor below. Other than the possibility of cutting himself in a not-very-sterile environment, there wasn’t much stimulation there. On the insides, cattle don’t even have a little color variety to enliven the day. I bet he might have found the steady flow of business people and co-workers streaming through with questions and comments and deliveries and greetings considerably less boring.
Years ago, I was a bridge tender: sat in a small building and waited for a boat to signal by radio or horn to open the bridge. Opening the bridge required walking out to the middle of the span, turning some knobs to lower booms to stop the cars at each end of the bridge, then turning some other knobs to swing the bridge open. Went 5 months of day shift without a single opening. Nothing to do but read, listen to the radio, play guitar, visit with friends who dropped by, do school work, have sex (well, I didn’t, but a co-worker lost his virginity on the graveyard shift), and, and, and :eek: That was the best job ever! :smack:
I used to sub in at the desk at the Hoover Institution at Stanford when the full-time person took lunch. It was mainly telling people where the various offices were (except for a few specific scholars who attracted cranks). One day I took call from Dan Quayle’s office looking for George Schultz.
I have a friend who spent some years as the night security guard for government offices. He sat in the foyer all shift and did nothing. He only remained in the job because they allowed him to read while on duty. For added stupidity, although he was armed he told me that he had no more authority than the average member of the public and, if someone chose to enter the building, he could merely tell them to leave. If they didn’t his next course of action would be to call the police because touching them would constitute an assault. But nothing ever happened.
