Most boring job you ever had...

[Archae]

I worked for less than a week at a lumber yard.

Stacking cut-off 2 x 4's.

Yup. Guy would saw off 2 x 4's and slide them to me, I'd stack them on pallets.

Like I said, I lasted less than a week.

[hlthe2b]

1. Boring sure, but a paid work-out it sounds like...

I've had my share of "bad" jobs, but all had sufficient variety and unpredictability so as not to be boring.

[PJMcK]

2. Yard work as a kid

I had a job taking care of a 3-acre property with a tennis court and a swimming pool. I worked for the owner for about four years in high school. One summer he wanted me to eradicate the crab grass on his lawn. I spent most of that summer on my knees pulling the shit out of the ground.

[elleng]

3. Filing clerk,

kind of like stacking lumber (but not outdoors, and no muscles needed!)

Needed the job so stayed a few months, until an eye injury kept me away. 'Good' thing too, as supervisor was kind of nutty.

[Aristus]

4. Working for a sales-training company.

They put together sales-training classes for car salesmen. That right there made it not the most edifying job in the world, to say nothing of boring.

The boss made it extremely stressful by pitting his workers (we were supposed to sell the sales-training courses to the dealerships) against each other with psychologically abusive tactics. When the job wasn't stone-boring, it was hell. I lasted three months.

Still the worst job I've ever had.

[Zoonart]

6. Car dealerships... ugh.

Once worked as a temp receptionist for a Cadillac dealership.... boring as hell, but hey... there was the perk of all of the
free floating testosterone and sexual harassment...

At the end of three weeks they wanted to hire me... NO THANKS... back to temping.

Oh... there also was the fake office that the temp agency sent me to. They did nothing that I could discern and the "boss" chased me around the desk...literally. Left that one after lunch and reported him to the cops. Not boring though.
Ahhhhhhh the 70's.

[unblock]

5. someone once told me that "boring" comes from within, not from without.

no job or task is boring. some are repetitive or mechanical, but it takes the a negative attitude of the person doing it to make it "boring".

if the task is repetitive, then you can challenge yourself to do it faster or figure out a way to do it more efficiently or automatically.
if the task simple enough that it doesn't require your full attention, then your mind may be free to multi-task on something else.

i once worked at an amusement park and sometimes it really busy, but sometimes it was hours of nothing but waiting, trapped in a booth with nothing to do. this was back before the days of ubiquitous headphones and portable players, but i just played music in my mind. i tried to remember all the lyrics of a song, or tried to figure out an interesting harmony.

there's always something interesting to do if you're inclined to find something interesting to do.


at least that's what i keep telling mini-unblock whenever he loses his electronics privileges. so far, it's not working....

[braddy]

13. Assembling screwdrivers, place the handle and then the driver in the simple horizontal press and

step on the button, it presses the metal into the handle, you then throw it into the big box of the others, if you drop something leave it, nothing is to interfere with the motions you are repeating for 8 hours.

[Wellstone ruled]

16. Empact!

[yonder]

7. I've had several but the one that comes to mind is cutting carnations...

...in a greenhouse, starting at 6 or 7 in the morning, all the while having to listen to piped in Muzak. The owner thought Muzak made the plants grow better. Not classical or jazz or anything else but Muzak. There's nothing like being force-fed the Muzak version of Hawaii 5-0 at 7:00 in the morning....with a hangover, and a very, very sharp knife.

[Mme. Defarge]

9. Oops!

Muzak! That’s worse than what I just posted below.

[Archae]

11. One job I had...

Piped-in Muzak while stocking shelves in a Wal-Mart type store, near Christmas.

After hearing Burl Ives for the 89th time sing "Holly Jolly Christmas," I quit.

[redqueen]

44. The store I worked they had a few songs from Sia's Christmas album

Also the Waitresses and a few other more interesting selections.

Not quite the classics but still maddening after the 200th time you've heard them.

[Mme. Defarge]

8. Try to top this ...

I worked for a printing company that printed telephone books and my job, until I told my boss that I refused to do it anymore, was to count the lines of type set each day. This was for the purpose of billing the client. I considered the work to be cruel and unusual. I also refused to serve coffee at meetings. 1970’s...

[rsdsharp]

10. Summer 1974 home from college I got a job for about a month working for the county.

They were laying new gravel on rural roads, and my job was to weigh the dump trucks as they left the quarry so the county knew how much rock the drivers hauled -- they were paid by the ton. Many of the roads being resurfaced were miles from the quarry, so much of the day consisted of me sitting in a little shack reading a book and listening to the radio, waiting for the trucks to return and pick up another load.

I think I was paid $2.35 an hour. One day an old farmer wandered in and declared that I was overpaid (he was wildly off on my hourly rate) and berated me for about 20 minutes while telling me he had made $1 a day in the depression and was happy to get it. I finally asked him if he would work for that today, and when he said NO! I asked then why would I? He stomped off in disgust, and I went back to my book..

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

12. Document production review in an antitrust case.

[abqtommy]

14. Night watchman at a Christian baording school when I was a student there. On the bright side,

a boring job allows for plenty of time for free-associative thinking.

[GemDigger]

15. I had one that was posted as "a boring job", person must be able to entertain themselves for long

periods of time. I shit you not. It was for a regional sales manager for a nationwide chain and he just needed someone to answer the phone if it rang.

He asked me what I had for hobbies and I told him. First day on the job and he gave me a wad of cash to get some games for the comp. I brought in my knitting, a reclining lawn chair, a TV and it was the best paying job I had at the time.

[blue neen]

17. Picking blueberries at a local farm.

Boring and nerve crushing, because there was a loudspeaker running some kind of heinous squawking noise. It was supposed to keep the birds away.

[COLGATE4]

18. Spent a couple of months in college one summer

taking Navy WWII training records and putting them on microfiche, one page at a time, manually. Beats working for a living but watching paint dry is true excitement when compared to this.

[Demovictory9]

39. I had one of those toy switch board things as a kid

[Backseat Driver]

53. So sorry - my dad might have changed all that for you -

he was a "Central Office LD Repair" analyst for a different Bell system, planning out the automated routes and re-routes of those LD calls all across the country. He and my mom traveled there for a week in the late '60s to check out the "opportunity." He decided not to take the job.

[Lars39]

20. Painting yellow curbs on a college campus.

The summer it was 105 in the shade with 75 percent humidity.

[BluesRunTheGame]

21. University Art Gallery

It was my Art School work-study job. As an art student I was usually ‘wound up to 10’ from early in the morning till late at night. My work-study job required me to sit still for 3 hours in a row a couple times a week.

Once in a while someone would wander in and look at art for a few minutes. It was contemporary art so ‘regular’ folks found it kind of hard to relate to.

Older people, particularly, thought I was the antique roadshow guy and would ask me questions about things I knew nothing about. Had a guy who’s uncle took a pocket knife off a dead Nazi in WW-2. He showed it to me and was disappointed I couldn’t tell him how much it was worth.

For some strange reason the school’s after hours phone rang in the gallery. I got to field calls from people who were upset that one or another of the faculty or staff weren’t returning their calls.

Once, one of the other work-study students left her lingerie catalog on the desk. I guess shopping for lingerie would be one way to deal with the boredom.

I’ll admit that I looked at the catalog.




.

[RobinA]

22. Every Job

I ever had ended up boring, because how often can you do the same thing, even if it starts out interesting?

[Kaleva]

23. Standing the 2400 to 1200 watch as CIWS gun captain for days on end in the Persian Gulf

Chain smoking cigarettes while sitting in a room the size of a closet for 12 hours every day.

[bluecollar2]

25. +100...n/t

[hack89]

50. I have done hundreds of miserable mid-watches

where you beg for a single ship to come over the horizon to break the boredom.

[bluecollar2]

26. Barracks fire watch

2400 to 0800...

On weekends hardly anyone was staying on base and once the E.M. club closed the barracks were a tomb...

Navy 79-83

Fortunately I only had to stand that watch a couple of times in "A" school.

[catbyte]

27. Working at a plant store where I had to spend hours wiping the dirt and who knows what all

off of Weeping Fig trees & polishing the leaves up for sale and/or placement in homes and businesses. Some of them were over 6' tall. You have to be very careful not to damage the leaves because if you accidentally snap off a leaf, it exudes this weird, sort of sticky, milky substance. If there is a hell, that will be my fate. I eventually got promoted to doing indoor landscaping, but man, that was awful.

[yuiyoshida]

28. Sweeping the parking lot of a Carpet Company

The owner had me out there all day...just sweeping the parking lot. meh.

[TlalocW]

29. It was a programming job

The company made flight simulators - huge metal spheres on hydraulics that when you walked into them to the "cockpit" immediately made you feel like you were on an airplane. Exciting, right? Well, I didn't work on those. I was a web/database programmer. My only project was one the other people in my group couldn't figure out - some sort of data entry web page and a reporting page that dealt with the data entered. I can't remember the particular problem that kept others from completing the project (it was a weird one), but I figured it out in a week and a half after being shown the various systems and tables I'd be working with, and... that was it. They literally didn't have any more work for me. I tried to learn what the other guys in the group were doing. They were using other languages and doing other stuff, and I thought maybe I could pick something up, but they were protective of their turf. So every day I would come in and ask the group lead what he wanted me to work on, and he would say he would try to find me something. I would go look at the various subroutines already written that you could use in any new stuff (like if you wanted to list all employees) so you didn't re-invent the wheel, and after that, to keep from falling asleep, I would surf the web for 8 hours or wander around the facility. I even went and asked the guy who was most affected by the problem I solved if there were anything else I could do for him. I think I did another web/database page that took a couple hours. Finally, after 3 months, group lead asked me to follow him - I knew that was it. He took me to HR, and in the process of letting me go, they tried to shame me for surfing the net so much, and I told them that was fine I was being let go, but they could go screw themselves because they had no work for me, and the group lead, if he felt like having some integrity, would say that instead of joining the HR chorus of making it my fault. That got him mad, and he started to lay into me for talking like that about him, and I said, "What are you going to do? Fire me?" I reiterated what they could go do and told them to get me through their process so I could go look for a job where I'd actually have work.

TlalocW

[TlalocW]

30. Second worse

It was before the job above. I had been laid off from a programming job during the tech bubble burst and couldn't find anything in my field so I did tech support for Sprint, and that was grueling in a boring way. We had training for two weeks where we had to show up at 6 every morning for 8 hours, and the first hour every day was the instructor looking for one of the two overhead projectors in the facility. Then he would hook it up to his computer, and he would bounce around in the mainly-web-based system we would be using to decide what he was going to show us that day. Sometimes something looked interesting, and someone in the class would ask what he was just looking at, and he would say that he couldn't teach it to us yet. Eventually he would turn the projector off so we couldn't see what he was looking at. He would leave for anywhere for 15 minutes to an hour at the time to handle his real job (I honestly think he forgot about us sometimes), and we were expected to stay in the room and stay off the internet. I started bringing in crossword puzzles, books, and playing cards to do magic tricks for other people in my group but eventually said screw it and was the first person to start surfing the web. Once on the floor, it wasn't much better. We were doing tech support for cell phone customers - this was pre-smart phones, and the majority of the calls we got were from people wanting to figure out how to download ringtones. Sprint had plans where you could pay extra to have access to them unlike now where it's relatively easy to put sound files on your Android/iPhone and use it for whatever.

TlalocW

[RobinA]

41. Yep, That's Sounds

like the working world of today.

[IADEMO2004]

31. Holding 2 buttons down watching press make car parts from roll of steel.

Couple times a shift feed a new roll of steel to the press and haul the parts to plating building.

Night shift get into bed 2am still hearing press boom boom boom boom.

[dameatball]

32. Taking cases of tomatoes off a line, weighing them and writing the weight on the box. All day.

But it was money.

[sl8]

33. What do you mean, horizontal boring or vertical boring?

With apologies and respect to Monty Python.

[LanternWaste]

34. Microfilming land title certificates.

And that's all it was. Grab a sheet from a stack and put it on the machine, push three or four buttons, take it off the table and put in another stack. Over and over and over and over and over and over...

But it was an after-hours job, no one else at the office park that late into the evening, and had a great outdoor atrium I'd take my breaks in and smoke a joint or two while blasting Springsteen from my boombox.

God bless the mid-eighties.

[MrScorpio]

35. Caddy

[912gdm]

36. check encoding.

It's when you print the amount of the check on the bottom area in that magnetic ink. You enter the total of the deposit slip, a credit, and enter each check as a debt. If it does not equal out you get an error and have to flip through each check to find your error.

It really sucks when you have a large deposit of a few hundred checks.


It was a M-F evening job from 5pm till whenever you finish. Could be 10PM, could be 1AM. Ya never knew!

It was 10-key data entry and it sucked. I did it for a few years until my wrist started acting up and I didn't want to risk carpel tunnel


At 5/3 bank I was allowed a 2$ error per transaction to send it through, while at Starr Bank I was allowed 5 bucks. So always look over your checks to make sure they weren't encoded incorrectly and you were over charged.

[hunter]

38. I did 10 key data entry of lab results long enough that I could do it on autopilot.

I could write entire novels and compose entire operas in my head while I was doing it.

Alas, I rarely wrote anything down when I got home from work because all I wanted to do was pop open a beer or two, eat dinner, and fall asleep watching television, all to dull the existential pain. What is the meaning of life? Why am I here?

But I was never bored.

Then I'd get up the next day and do it all over again.

[912gdm]

40. ok.

[Delmette2.0]

55. Yep, the months of data entry.

Sitting at the work station, eight hours a day, nothing bit numbers and letters. I did new accounts (interpreting bad handwriting), getting the programmers work (jubberish) on 90 column key punch cards, and restaurant bills for a local Country Club. Then i had to verify the work of my co-worker. Rinse and repeat.
My shoulders hurt at the end of every day. The co-worker was slower and managed to get overtime to "catch up".

This was a good paying job for the 70's with health insurance and lower interest rates on loans for bank employees. I was so glad to move on to accounts payable and learn something new and be with a variety of people.

[VarryOn]

37. Night watchman at the ingate of a manufacuring plant...in the days before

Smart phones. 10 pm until 4:30 am. I parked my car near the entrance and sat there all night and watched things.

[Major Nikon]

47. I was a night watchman for an oil company

The highlight of my career was climbing to the top of a derrick they had set up in the yard and taking a wizz off the top.

[VarryOn]

48. Like you, I took a few wizzes myself, but...

Not from a derrick though, due to my fear of heights. Usually down in a drainage ditch.

More often though, I found myself otherwise entertained around 2 to 3 am as a 19 year-old male often woud lol

[Stuart G]

42. I worked in a factory and made mufflers. Midas Mufflers for cars.

The machine would come down, and I would put the thing into the muffler that was being made. It would come down and secure the thing or part on the inside of the muffler. Then I would pick the muffler up, and send it down the assembly line to the next person who put another thing in the muffler. Over and Over and Over and over and over and over and over and over again....It was a summer job and I did that for 6 weeks.

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER....paid well for the mid- 60s about $14.00 in today's money.

but over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again..

[redqueen]

43. Fitting room attendant

Had a second job for a while, working retail. Mostly standing there. When it was busy I got to untangle / re-hang clothes and sweep.

[Totally Tunsie]

45. My first job ever, after school, at age 16...

working as a collator for a small printing company. Stood at a table with 4 others, putting page 3 on top of page 4 and passing it down to the next kid in line. Boring as hell, with tired feet.

[backtoblue]

46. Packing chicken in boxes at Tyson

Worst job ever. Lasted about two weeks...

[sakabatou]

49. Stapling form packets together

[Ohiogal]

51. I sat in my dad's office all day long all by myself

answering the phone and taking messages while he was out of town. This was in the days before answering machines.

[pdxflyboy]

52. Bank Teller

N/T

[redstatebluegirl]

54. Detasseling corn.

Up at the crack of dawn, out into a wet field, got soaked and dirty then the heat came. I lost my gloves once, and cut my hands to pieces. Growing up in a rural Illinois it was one of the few jobs for teenagers.