Try what my college librarian called “shelf reading.”
1. Grab a clipboard, hilighter & dustcloth
2. Go to your assigned section
3. Check for book from list on clipboard. Is book there?
**Y ** Pick up book, dust all 6 sides, make sure card # & ISBN # match, replace book, check off list, repeat until shift ends.
**N ** Look for book. If book not found, hilight it on list, go to step 3.
I once had a job labelling documents. Lift sticker, slap sticker on paper, turn page. Rinse, repeat.
That boss encouraged us to take breaks to ward off the monotony (hah!), so the nonsmokers would join those who did smoke for an hourly freeze-your-ass-off chitchat outside. We would have a lot of fun sometimes. They were the best crew I’ve ever worked with on a longish-term project.
I loved that job.
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“What do you do if the envelopes don’t fit?” “Well, if you fold 'em, they fire ya. I usually throw um out.”
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“Blue envelope!”
I don’t know, just seemed to fit somehow. Continue on.
Inserting. Stand in a hot, dusty printing room, 15 feet away from the printing press, on a concrete floor, shoving stacks of flyers and advertisments into the fold of newspapers. And you couldn’t talk much, because A) the press was too loud and B) you had to send your newspapers on down the line in stacks of 25. That was the job that introduced me to heat exhaustion.
Mall retail store. Because we were supposed to stay on our feet and “look busy” even when there was no reason to do so. Now the most boring job I’ve had was stuffing envelopes.
Yeah, I had this job, too. Except we also had the fun of shelf-reading, which means checking if every book on the shelf was in the right place. It’s boring enough for fiction but it’s mind-numbing when you have to check the non-fiction stuff, especially the craft books because a lot of them were very thin and always out of order.
Painting numbers on lengths of pipe as they went past me on a conveyer. Each job started with 1. Some ran well into the five digits. Every 3 or 4 minutes the pipes would move; I would dip my paintbrush into the can; And paint the next number. I have a picture someone took, of me painting “9999” on a pipe (this particular run had gone on for a month or so).
My mind still hurts thinking about it.
Working in a parkade in the summer, seven days per week from 6am to noon. But I wasn’t even the ticket/cash person in the booth. They had recently renovated the parkade, and I sat at a folding table near the entrance to the new section, and handed out discount coupons to the people who were parking “by the hour”. However, the new section of the parkade was about 95% monthly parkers with a pass, so I only had to hand out about 20 coupons over the course of a six hour shift, and the majority of those 20 coupons were in about a half-hour period from 7:30 to 8:00am.
I killed time by reading a lot of books and listening to music.
I only lasted three weeks. The girl before me was there for a month and a half! I don’t know how she did it.
Can culler. Specifically, fish can culler. More specifically, sardine can culler. Most of those stupid tins of sardines you see in the store? I probably gazed dully at a good handful of those things. My mother ordered the covered for nearly every one. (I say nearly, as a couple brands fall outside of our umbrella, but we covered most of 'em.)
Pick up five cans from a conveyer belt full of identical cans. Stand in horse stall (that’s what I called them, you’re stuck in a little square with only enough room to send your full box onto another conveyer belt behind you) and give the cans a cursory glance-around, tossing out anything that has a hanging spur, bad seam, is leaking, whatever. Shove into a cardboard box of appointed size beside you. Repeat until full. Swing box onto belt. Repeat until dead.
Man, I hated that job. No, wait, there was one worse! A machine checked the cans for you, and you stood at a “stacker” machine, in yet another horse stall. All you did was wait for the cans to come to you, pick them up and put them in a box. Lift, stack, lift, stack, lift stack. Repeat until dead as the fish in the cans.
Damn, I hate sardines.
My first couple of summer jobs were crappy minimum wage restaurant kitchen jobs. So after sophomore year, I signed up with Kelly Temps. The assignment I got was at a local radiology clinic in a downtown office building. They were remodeling their waiting room, so it looked like a construction site and some patients would assume the office was closed when they arrived for their appointments.
So I had to sit there all day and tell anyone who came along that the clinic was still open and they should go down the other hallway to the temporary waiting room. People only showed up once an hour or so, so I could read most of the time. I worked my way through several Tom Clancy novels. When I didn’t have a book on me, I’d borrow magazines from the waiting room. (I concluded that the New Yorker is the Most Boring Magazine in the World.)
The job was only supposed to last a month, but then they didn’t like the wallpaper so it was extended by several weeks. And the office was open long enough each day that I got a couple of hours of overtime each day. (On preview, this job was similar to Waenara’s.)
I think the insurance company job was the following summer. This was the northeast regional office for a large life insurance company, which was sending its client files to offsite storage. There were about six of us college students doing this and we were set up in the cafeteria. We’d take the files from the file room, put each in a manila file folder and label it with the account number. We’d then put them in those cardboard banker’s boxes and label each with the range of files contained within. (I got really good at assembling those boxes.) The guy managing us told us he expected us to produce at least two filled boxes each per day, and we knew that we could do that before 10am, so we stretched out our day by talking among ourselves. We’d also look through the files for interesting ones. I found the file for an anesthesiologist friend of my parents, so I was able to tell them how much she earned. And I found the $10 million file for Eddie Antar (of Crazy Eddie fame; this was before he fled to Israel after being accused of fraud).
I’ve been around the offset printing block a few times. Aside from actually printing, some of the most dull, dreary bits of bindery work and miscellany I’ve done include:
- Manual collating, sometimes including stapling (variety!)
- Collating blank paper in stacks of 50 or 100 with sheets of cardboard, then clamping/weighing them down and gluing them on one side to make pads of blank paper
- Folding thousands of pamphlets (using a machine, thankfully)
- Punching out perforated hang tags
- Loading gigantic lifts of paper on a large 5-colour press. (I’m short and far from buff, so this was a little painful)
- Cleaning out said press for changeover to new colours or end of day
- Cleaning out paper jams in the same 5-colour press (just imagine; 5 main blankets, 5 offset rollers, and hundreds of ink rollers into which paper can disintegrate! Don’t ask how you manually turn the rollers; it’s not pretty)
- Cleaning all of the ink off of a press – inside and out – that probably hadn’t been used longer than I’ve been alive
Fun!
Encoding checks at a bank. You know those numbers at the bottom of the check? Well, they don’t get there from elves. It happens via people sitting in a huge room of encoding machines reading your handwriting and typing the number into a keypad, dropping the check into a slot, and having whoosh through and the numbers get encoded there. It is the only job I have had that I actually could do better (process more checks per hour) by NOT thinking about what I was doing. Numbers in through the eyes and out through the fingers. I lasted 6 months.
Picker/Packer for a pet supply company.
Hours upon hours of walking up and down isles pushing a shopping carriage and filling orders. The best part was that there were bonuses and incentives for high production, so the most knowledgable picker/packers wouldn’t help the newbies find/identify items.
Security guard. Overnight at a construction sight, a twelve hour shift on the weekends. It doesn’t get much worse than that.
I take that back - the job I did for my dad when he was village manager was. Comparing old checks the village wrote to check stubs and bank statements and accounting worlsheets and budgets and reports and making everything add up for six weeks one summer. I can’t even remember the exact details or why I was doing it - it was that bad.
Almost as bad as when I was in telemarketing. But I won’t go there. Too many bad memories.
Ya know, sometimes I think my life sucks…
Processing (copying/assembling) tax returns for H&R Block.
Grab file. Unstaple. Grab each page and insert photosensitive paper behind it before feeding to the Copyflex (wet-copy) machine. Grab original from the belt if the machine didn’t separate it from the exposed paper. Organize copies into one stack, original into another. Staple.
Working at Target. No, seriously. You’d think retail would be a nice interesting job. It wasn’t. All you did was walk around, pick shit up that peoples’ little darlings had left all over the floor, and “finger space” hangers - retail stores insist that the hangers must be hung evenly on the racks. If there are only two hangers, they must be equally apart from each other. If there are several, you run your fingers through the hangers and “finger space” them so that they look even. You know, despite the fact that some fucker is going to come up behind you and mess it up as soon as you’re done.
I worked there for a month. Fuck that noise.
I’d love to say that working at a pizza place was monotonous, but it wasn’t. You never knew what to expect at Domino’s.
~Tasha
Take your pick: [ul]telemarketer.[]envelope stuffer.[]can sorter in a Coca-Cola warehouse.[]mailroom.[]grant application labeller.[/ul]