Most boring jobs
I saw this discussion at Althouse about most boring jobs:
BBC collects descriptions of the most boring jobs... and the jobs are interestingly boring, but I was surprised that they all involve repetitive physical motions. When I think of boring jobs, I think of jobs that draw on the mind.
I'm sure the boringly boring jobs were not selected for the piece. There's only so much one can talk about working as a stocker at Walmart.
In many of the jobs being bitched about, the main problem was they were pointless, meaningless, or futile:
I worked for weeks unpacking small cereal bars from large boxes and then repackaging the same cereal bars into smaller boxes. Pointless. Jude Connor
....
After I left school I got a summer job patrolling a stretch of canal in Burnley to stop people falling in. Problem was, the canal was drained, with hardly an inch of water in it. Following that, I worked in a factory tearing off strips of Sellotape from the tops of flattened cardboard boxes. Simon Mitchell, Sheffield
....
Sticking labels on animal food bags. There were three types: cattle, pig or sheep. Every few days you would switch between the types and get to stick on a different label. I actually started looking forward to a change of label. Nick, Hove
....
I once spent six months stapling 400 reports every day. Just stapling, every day. One of many boring jobs. Yawn! Suzy Wild
I once had a temp job which consisted of taking staples out of pieces of paper. I lasted only one morning. Mari, Kent
Those last two were a nice juxtaposition.
But I see Althouse's point: the worst job I ever had from a tedium point of view was part of a volunteering job at Holly Hill Hospital in Raleigh. To begin with, they had me tri-folding brochures. I got pretty good at that, and the great part is that one's conscious brain doesn't have to engage. It was a purely physical process, so I could daydream about other stuff while folding brochures.
But then, they noticed I was good at detail. And they had me going through the mailing list of donors (which was a huge printout...dot matrix... on those huge pieces of paper with the green/white areas) - I had the current list, and updates from another printout. It was tedious, and while it had meaning [making sure you keep in touch with donors is super-important for such orgs], it engaged just enough of my brain that I couldn't think about other stuff and get the job done.
So I cast about to find any way to get assigned to a different job, therefore I lied about knowing Aldus Pagemaker when I overheard others having a difficult time redoing the org chart. Playing with Pagemaker was fun, and I got to do interesting stuff like help design the brochures the next set of volunteers would be folding.
Anyway, I do tend to give interns very tedious jobs...and this is pretty common in many office jobs like mine, because interns just don't know enough and won't learn fast enough (usually) in the few weeks we have them to do something that requires a lot of background knowledge. In my case, I have the intern go through the annual statements of hundreds of insurance companies, look for one specific small piece of info, and note whether it changed from the prior year. [Most won't have] At a prior company, the interns were given historical mortality tables as they were in a database, and had to check against the published numbers from actuarial journals. Both of these are extremely tedious, but it doesn't take much knowledge to be able to do them.
And they're actually important.
It is simpler to explain the mortality table example -- there were two interns working on that, and I asked them if anybody told them why we wanted them to work on this. They said no. (They may have been humoring me, or wanting a break from looking at the tables. But I wouldn't be surprised if nobody told them.)
The reason why is that many insurers, especially smaller ones, were dependent on this database resource, and did not have the resources to check that the tables are correct. This affects not only their pricing but also their reserving. The reserving aspect is because the reserves for a life insurance policy is determined at date of issue, not current mortality tables. So even though some of these tables were decades old, I assured them that there were people out there who use those tables, and would implement any fixes they made.
The worst kind of job is the kind where you're being asked to do something tedious and boring... and nobody even uses it. What's the point?
That's why I tell interns and newbies what I'm using their work product before. In the case of the intern project I have, in prior iterations, it's helped my company win new business. That's pretty damn important.
It's still a boring job, though.
BBC collects descriptions of the most boring jobs... and the jobs are interestingly boring, but I was surprised that they all involve repetitive physical motions. When I think of boring jobs, I think of jobs that draw on the mind.
I'm sure the boringly boring jobs were not selected for the piece. There's only so much one can talk about working as a stocker at Walmart.
In many of the jobs being bitched about, the main problem was they were pointless, meaningless, or futile:
I worked for weeks unpacking small cereal bars from large boxes and then repackaging the same cereal bars into smaller boxes. Pointless. Jude Connor
....
After I left school I got a summer job patrolling a stretch of canal in Burnley to stop people falling in. Problem was, the canal was drained, with hardly an inch of water in it. Following that, I worked in a factory tearing off strips of Sellotape from the tops of flattened cardboard boxes. Simon Mitchell, Sheffield
....
Sticking labels on animal food bags. There were three types: cattle, pig or sheep. Every few days you would switch between the types and get to stick on a different label. I actually started looking forward to a change of label. Nick, Hove
....
I once spent six months stapling 400 reports every day. Just stapling, every day. One of many boring jobs. Yawn! Suzy Wild
I once had a temp job which consisted of taking staples out of pieces of paper. I lasted only one morning. Mari, Kent
Those last two were a nice juxtaposition.
But I see Althouse's point: the worst job I ever had from a tedium point of view was part of a volunteering job at Holly Hill Hospital in Raleigh. To begin with, they had me tri-folding brochures. I got pretty good at that, and the great part is that one's conscious brain doesn't have to engage. It was a purely physical process, so I could daydream about other stuff while folding brochures.
But then, they noticed I was good at detail. And they had me going through the mailing list of donors (which was a huge printout...dot matrix... on those huge pieces of paper with the green/white areas) - I had the current list, and updates from another printout. It was tedious, and while it had meaning [making sure you keep in touch with donors is super-important for such orgs], it engaged just enough of my brain that I couldn't think about other stuff and get the job done.
So I cast about to find any way to get assigned to a different job, therefore I lied about knowing Aldus Pagemaker when I overheard others having a difficult time redoing the org chart. Playing with Pagemaker was fun, and I got to do interesting stuff like help design the brochures the next set of volunteers would be folding.
Anyway, I do tend to give interns very tedious jobs...and this is pretty common in many office jobs like mine, because interns just don't know enough and won't learn fast enough (usually) in the few weeks we have them to do something that requires a lot of background knowledge. In my case, I have the intern go through the annual statements of hundreds of insurance companies, look for one specific small piece of info, and note whether it changed from the prior year. [Most won't have] At a prior company, the interns were given historical mortality tables as they were in a database, and had to check against the published numbers from actuarial journals. Both of these are extremely tedious, but it doesn't take much knowledge to be able to do them.
And they're actually important.
It is simpler to explain the mortality table example -- there were two interns working on that, and I asked them if anybody told them why we wanted them to work on this. They said no. (They may have been humoring me, or wanting a break from looking at the tables. But I wouldn't be surprised if nobody told them.)
The reason why is that many insurers, especially smaller ones, were dependent on this database resource, and did not have the resources to check that the tables are correct. This affects not only their pricing but also their reserving. The reserving aspect is because the reserves for a life insurance policy is determined at date of issue, not current mortality tables. So even though some of these tables were decades old, I assured them that there were people out there who use those tables, and would implement any fixes they made.
The worst kind of job is the kind where you're being asked to do something tedious and boring... and nobody even uses it. What's the point?
That's why I tell interns and newbies what I'm using their work product before. In the case of the intern project I have, in prior iterations, it's helped my company win new business. That's pretty damn important.
It's still a boring job, though.