What was the most boring job you've had & how did you cope?

[Mister M]

I'm just curious about what boring jobs people have had,

 

how long you stayed at the job,

 

how you coped with the boredom,

 

And what impact it had on your life.

 

For example for a couple of years I worked in an office doing menial jobs - and the more 'interesting' parts of the job I was unable to do as I wasn't trained.

I stayed in the job for 18 months. It was only part time (18 hours a week), while I was doing another job which I enjoyed.

I coped with the boredom by walking round the building, taking more cigarette breaks, surfing on the internet.

Whilst doing the job I felt miserable there, under utilised & not stretched, yet when I was asked to do things that sounded interesting I couldn't do them as I hadn't received the training, so I felt incredibly frustrated.

 

I'd be interested to read other people's experiences.

[Scozzie]

I worked in an appliances shop in a village with a population of 3000 (if you included the caravan park and campsites).

Good golly it was boring. No one ever came in.

When it was sunny, I'd put a sign on the door and go to the beach - it was only 500 metres from the door..... And the average temperature in winter was 24 degrees.

 

It wasn't such a bad life.

 

(Agnes Water by the Great Barrier Reef)

[JFKvsNixon]

Before I went to university I took an agency job in a massive bakery to earn some extra cash. My job was to put a set number of packets of hot-cross buns into a pallet, and then pile the pallets on top of each other in piles of 10.

 

10 hours of absolutely no mental stimulation, to make matters worse I was covering the night shift. It took around 30 seconds to full a pallet so heavens knows how many hot-cross buns I packed during my time there.

 

I really respect people who do that for a living, because I'd really struggle.

 

When I was at university I did one shift of pot-washing at one of the halls of residence and that was enough for me.

[Danny_Boy]

I worked as a customer service advisor in a call centre (I won't name and shame the company) when I was 19 I was there for 9 horrendous months. Constantly 35 customers queuing on the phone to take out their frustrations with the companies returns policies on us. It was like prison work, tied to the desk for 8 hours with timed breaks and if you had more than ten minutes toilet time in a day you had to explain why.

 

we weren't allowed on the net for anything other than work purposes so we used to pass the time by emailing each other. Easily the worst job I've ever done and a big reason why I'm always polite when dealing with call centres.

 

In the end I was fired as I thought a customer was on hold whilst I slagged them off to a colleague but apparently I'd forgotten to press the hold button.

[Harrystottle]

I once had a job at a factory that produced cardboard boxes. Stimulating it wasn't.

 

One of the machines used to produce a stack of cut, flat folded boxes and fire them down a set of rollers; at the other end were blokes whose job for their entire shift was to pick them up and put them on pallets. For eight hours.

 

We used to call them the crypt kicker five. They weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer but doing that job, you couldn't be. I did it myself for a few shifts and it really was mind numbing.

 

The job was for the holidays and the money was OK, but I couldn't have stood it full time.

[smithy266]

As a student, turning industrial gloves outside out, after they had been sewn inside out.

Edited September 22, 2015 by smithy266

[Halibut]

Nights in a pork pie factory. Mostly was scraping semi congealed fat off baking trays and putting the cleaned trays back down a conveyor. Mind numbingly dull, but if one worked really fast for a while one could build up a surplus of clean trays and then take an unnoficial ten minute break.

I stayed three or four months - it was pretty well paid for a lad still in his teens; I saved enough money to go on an Inter-rail trip around Europe.

Edited September 22, 2015 by Halibut

[tzijlstra]

So many... I had to turn cheeses during 12 hour shifts in a cheese-factory. I used pressure washers to clean shrimp-sorting machinery from 10PM to 10AM. I worked in -40 degrees celsius packing supermarket delivery trolleys in plastic. Did 12 hour shifts on my knees crawling to cut lettuce behind an ever moving tractor. I must have peeled about 100,000 flower bulbs and dead-headed a similar amount crawling through tulip fields. I checked potatoes for the right size, manually. I have spent days running behind a tractor ploughing to pick up rocks. I delivered four different newspapers on four different routes in the same area (always getting wrong who got what paper). But most boring of all was doing a PhD. Time to move on now!

[TJC1]

Loads of boring and mundane jobs from pot washing to filling up conveyor belts with sweets to working for a bank collecting mortgage missed payments...just thankful all that is behind me.

 

---------- Post added 22-09-2015 at 21:20 ----------

 

Nights in a pork pie factory. Mostly was scraping semi congealed fat off baking trays and putting the cleaned trays back down a conveyor. Mind numbingly dull, but if one worked really fast for a while one could build up a surplus of clean trays and then take an unnoficial ten minute break.

I stayed three or four months - it was pretty well paid for a lad still in his teens; I saved enough money to go on an Inter-rail trip around Europe.

 

Inter railing the best fun..everybody should do it!

 

---------- Post added 22-09-2015 at 21:22 ----------

 

What impact?

Well get an education and dont sell time. Poor people sell time.

 

Thats all I know but its the most important lesson. Time is the only resource you can never get back.

[Harleyman]

Mattress tester at a bedding factory. Coped with it by just sleeping all the time