Most boring job (you've ever done)?

[Augie March]

Think I've posted this before, but when I was in Australia backpacking, I worked for a furniture and home furnishings shop. The shop sat on a second floor, the first floor housed a car park and a display of garden furniture. My job, was to guard that furniture. All day long.

At first I thought this was a sweet ride, doing nothing all day and getting paid for it? Yeah! Then the first hour went by, then the next, followed inevitably by the next... that first day lasted an eternity. The second day I almost smashed all the furniture out of sheer boredom. The third day I didn't show up. The fourth day I was sacked.

 

[silver]

I've done some really stupidly boring jobs

Chocolate factory........ putting labels on tins as they went past me on a conveyor belt or picking out the sweets which werent wrapped properly - for 12 hours at a time

Fruit factory - peeling oranges, for a 12 hour shift (to be fair, only did one shift there)

Glue factory - putting bottles of glue in boxes, at least the smell of the glue meant I was a tad 'unusual' for most of the time so it didn't seem so bad

 

[Pickman's model]

there's worse than that out there, silver: Nice work if you can get it ... are these the most boring jobs in the world?

 

[weltweit]

Apple picking was pretty dull, it was only the banter with colleagues that made it bearable.

 

[ElizabethofYork]

My first job many years ago was as a copy typist. My job consisted of typing names and addresses on envelopes. All day. Every day.

Oh, and the manager of the typing pool was a right cow. We weren't even allowed to talk.

 

[brixtonblade]

1) Picking flowers - piece work, made my hands bleed, noone to talk to
2) Putting sausages in to packets
3) Emptying rotting meat in to a skip after getting demoted from (2) after throwing a sausage at someone the other side of the floor

 

[gaijingirl]

Filing in an insurance office in the 80s. Just filing. All day long.
Library (putting books back on shelves - essentially filing) also in the 80s.
Financial research for a company in the City of London in the 00s.

I've had some really interesting and fun jobs too though.

 

[Winot]

Packing food in the Co-op cold store.

Fruit picking.

Assembling plastic fishing tackle boxes. That was the worst. When I found myself crying with boredom in the loos after 3 days I realised I didn't need the money that much.

 

[xes]

cleaning a conveyerbelt that was used in aeroplane meal making. (perks of that job was a big fuck off freezer full of little sausages and bits of chicken shame I was a speed freak at the time and lived off of nutrashakes)

Halving avacadoes in a sandwitch making factory

Putting bits of paper into envelopes.

illegally restamping wood from C16 to C24! (at a builders yard that I presume, as this was only just over a year ago...still does this...was not there for long, worse job I ever had, and I was a supervisor)

door to door salesman for doubleglazing and another time carpet cleaners.
(first job I ever had)

I'm sure there are more.


shoot for the stars, baby...

 

[eoin_k]

Line work in a pie factory (highpoint was someone writing "Repent all ye who enter here" in pies);
Process work in two plastic factories (lowpoint was going through a box of widgets checking that they weren't fucked);
Data entry for an ambulance chasers (highpoint was organising a rubber band ball making competition);
Various shit for an insurance company (highpoint was discovering the flight simulator hidden in Excel in the late 1990s).

 

[Spymaster]

Working in a spring factory.

Springs are essentially coils of wire with the ends ground flat. My job was to hand load the springs into the grinding machine. This entailed picking up the springs from the box on my right and placing them into holes on a rotating disk that passed them through a grinder, whereupon the springs fell out into a box on my left.

9 to 5 on Saturdays for £1 an hour.

 

[StoneRoad]

I think the most boring job I ever did was stuffing envelopes with newsletters and several adverts / inserts, and putting on address labels. Not to mention loading paper into the copier ...
(also, then making up the promotional carrier bags) for a local festival. To make it worse, I didn't get the free pass I was promised as part of the deal, the full cost was deducted from my last week's wages.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Bloke sits at the end of my road with a sign pointing the way to a hand car wash thing. He sets up at 8am and sits there until 6pm, 7 days a week. Longest I've noticed is he did 21 days without a day off. He's playing with his phone most of the time, fucker must have some serious battery-life. BB2 talks to him, I don't as he doesn't speak any English at all, but seems a nice enough fella.

 

[extra dry]

Working with frozen prawns, 6 days a week 8 hours a day. Summer job working in an awful factory with some of the same people who had bullied me for 3 years at the local school. Got frostbite and a deep dislike for prawns/scalops/lobster, never ever buy frozen sea food, it has been stepped on, spat on.

 

[moody]

working shelf filling at tescos at nights.

great money but terrible job, boring as fuck and nights soon take a toll.

all my co-workers there had no personalities and seemed boring as fuck.

 

[ffsear]

Mcdonalds as a teenager, i actually enjoyed the cooking part, but working on the till you had to deal with some absolute asshole customers. This was in Thorton Heath though

 

[Jon-of-arc]

My last job, working for an electronics wholesaler, as a "customer service account handler", where all queries where supposed to be handled by email. They sold it as dealing with complex written enquiries for my own caseload of high-level, big spending accounts. Instead I ended up doing other peoples data entry and copying and pasting the same 2 or 3 emails (badly written and terribly punctuated by someone else, which they wouldn't even let me correct or re-write) and data-entrying returns of damaged and over-ordered stock. I made tons of mistakes, as I tend to with any ultra repetetive task that requires zero thought, loads of attention to detail, and a high workload, and they sacked me. It's where I was working when I was first referred for possible ADHD. Absolutely poisonous atmosphere, with tons of backstabbing, gossip and open slagging of anyone and everyone by a group of people who were had massively over-inflated sense of their own importance and competence. Really knocked my confidence, getting turfed out by that shit hole.

Now working in a place more in keeping with my talents and skills, where, after a rocky start, they are starting to appreciate my qualities. Same company a certain candidate for the recent Tory leadership (and now fairly senior minister) massively talked up her importance in, and was roundly mocked in the press for not correcting the part of her wiki article which talked it up so much. Obviously in a completely different department to her - no one I've spoken to knew her whilst she was there - and only on a temp contract, but was interesting reading about her lies in the press. I had a couple of calls from reporters that I had to redirect to the press office, obviously looking for a comment about her.

 

[twentythreedom]

Bloke sits at the end of my road with a sign pointing the way to a hand car wash thing. He sets up at 8am and sits there until 6pm, 7 days a week. Longest I've noticed is he did 21 days without a day off. He's playing with his phone most of the time, fucker must have some serious battery-life. BB2 talks to him, I don't as he doesn't speak any English at all, but seems a nice enough fella.

Reminds me - What happened to all those GOLF SALE sign-holding people? Were everywhere for a while

 

[moody]

Reminds me - What happened to all those GOLF SALE sign-holding people? Were everywhere for a while

why would you pay someone to hold a sign when you can just put a sign on a post?

 

[twentythreedom]

why would you pay someone to hold a sign when you can just put a sign on a post?

Because it'll be removed, presumably

 

[pogo 10]

Got to be the mushroom factory and posting local paper through doors.

 

[Plumdaff]

Various packing jobs at distribution warehouses. I used to do a lot of sleepover care work which was often just being in an odd spare room in an older person's house keeping very quiet while they slept, that could be very boring not that you wanted it to be eventful. I had a job planting trees on the side of the motorway which would have been boring apart from the horrible Scottish winter weather conditions which made it more like a horrific fight for survival.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

why would you pay someone to hold a sign when you can just put a sign on a post?

Because it'll be removed, presumably

Yes, you can't just stick up adverts wherever you like, but they can't stop a person from holding a sign, so long as he's not causing an obstruction.

Similar to trailers you see in fields near motorways. Adverts are banned near motorways as they distract the driver, but a lorry trailer is allowed to have whatever you want written on it and there's no law about parking it in a private field so long as you have the land-owner's permission.

 

[weltweit]

Have I mentioned the time I had to shovel shit for a week?

Actually it wasn't so bad, once I got used to the smell.

 

[DotCommunist]

why would you pay someone to hold a sign when you can just put a sign on a post?

Bill Stickers will be prosecuted

 

[twentythreedom]

Free Bill Stickers! Bill Stickers is innocent

 

[SpookyFrank]

Pot washing. Simultaneously boring and intolerable due to the cramped, overheated conditions and the cuntishness of the rest of the kitchen staff.

 

[DotCommunist]

I quite liked potwash. Lived above the resteraunt so everything was so much easier and you get into a rythm of zen like calm as the hands move on autopilot and the mind soars into realms of thought that largely dealt with what I have just read and females who I really liked. Couldn't stay though. Also the pruning up of hands always fucks me off