http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36195442

Surely he knew that a job like that would be boring?

8 hrs a day picking cabbage plants count?
Driving back and forward in a field at 4mph was another one…
My dad was chatting to an Ozzie farmer who had broken his leg, got his daughter to sow the grain crop, she couldn’t turn the tractor around at the end of the field but that was OK as it was only 4 times a day…

Me
delivering pizza part time, always weekends,always stuck in traffic

delivering pizza part time, always weekends,always stuck in traffic

a likely excuse

I think it’s either Binners or Jambalaya. 😉

Worst one I ever had was a supposed full time job in the finishing room at loakes shoe factory as i left school…8 hrs a day spraying black or brown spray into the little holes on the brogues was enough to send me to college at the end of the summer!

Doubt id have been able to sue due to boredom though

Seed cleaning, exactly what it says. It made picking pickling onions in winter almost appealing.

“I used to go and sit in the toilet cubicles. I would always be the most eager person to get up and make the tea. I would hide behind my screen and surround myself with files so I looked busy, but I wasn’t doing anything.”

I know just the place that can help with these levels of tedium

Mine “museum curator” Summer job thankfully
Stand still in perfect silence watching folk do nothing in particular
Occasionally be dumb when they ask you about the exhibits which i knew nothing about it
8 hours standing in silence basically

Horas fluffer was a boring job as i was never ever needed

For a summer job I worked in a factory. The job was to fill moulds with foam, let them set then cut them out. For 8 hours. I lasted 2 days and got a job at tesco stacking shelves which was much more interesting. The guy who trained me had been there for 8 years, I have no idea how he managed. Especially since they had radio 1 with its very limited play list blaring all day every day.

The 10 weeks I spent in a warehouse unpacking boxes was hard to justify just to get some cash. Once spent a day filing paper but worst was stuffing envelopes – I did a day then didn’t go back.

Made my time working at McDonald’s seemed fine really!

It’s interesting to see how long people lasted, good job that jobs must have been plentiful 🙂 No wonder the country is full of hard working people willing to do these jobs 😉

Stone picking 🙁 exactly as described, tractor and trailer set in low first so moving at about .5 mile an hour, you walk alongside it throwing all the stones you can into it from a ploughed and disced field. A week’s worth of that nonsense made no difference to the field but bored you to tears and was back breaking.

Bread factory on the production line, dipping bread rolls into grated cheese to make cheesy buns.
I was a student, so needed the money, lasted a day 😆

After I’d done an interesting vibration diagnosis job on Ford diesel engines, proving I could weed out ones that had damaged balance shaft drive gears from ones that were OK, I then had to test every single engine that came down the production line for about 18 months. Tedious isn’t the word.

I can clearly remember thinking immediately after avoiding a massive car smash, that if I’d had the accident, I’d have got some time off work, and being annoyed.

Also, taking ice cream makers out of damp cardboard boxes and putting them in dry cardboard boxes was dull.

Unemployed

Get up

Find job advertisement

Write covering letter

Get absolutely no feedback, not even and automated response

Repeat untill you give up and do all the house work, have dinner cooked and ready for when the OH comes at home at which point her assertion that “I don’t mind, get whatever you fancy for dinner” didn’t include whatever you’ve spent the last hour preparing. And now that she has someone doing all the housework all day every day she just leaves everything in a state.

Hateing my life right now.

Summer job on a production line in a frozen foods factory sprinkling cheese on lasagnes. I don’t even like cheese 😐

TINAS – you skipped the other bit tough 😉 job hunting scouring the internet all alone

Alas a man cannot live by barely legal eastern European porn alone……….

I think I managed about 500 applications in 3 months….long time

Bottle stacker, lasted less than 2 weeks

Envelope opening.
In the days of the building society privatisations, sometimes 12-14 hour days for several weeks, depending on the volume of mail, there’d be a hundred or so people with paperknives slitting open two sides of an envelope. Weren’t allowed to take the contents out either.
Survival of the fittest- as the quantity of mail tapered, the number of people who ‘weren’t required tomorrow’ increased.

I worked in a cardboard box factory, taking newly made boxes from a pile over here to a pile over there. All day, with nobody else to speak to. Managed 3 weeks or so.

A mate had that beat though, he sat in a chair and watched bottles of Pepsi go past on a conveyor belt all day.

picking burnt cornflakes out on a conveyor belt of hot cornflakes straight out of the oven.

I lasted about 3hrs.

if you got a packet of cornflakes with a lot of burnt ones in about august 1998, sorry.

Call Centre job, 18 months of having the same conversation over and over again, every 3-4 mins, all day, every day.

There was never a break between calls, labour was carefully metered out using temps and transferring call traffic between different centres doing similar work to ensure waiting times were always between 20-60 seconds, short enough so customers didn’t get pissed off, long enough to avoid ‘wastage’ by having people sitting around for 10 seconds between calls ‘idle’.

I hated it, I’d starve before I’d do it again, it was 20 years ago now but I still shudder at the thought, the relentless monotony of it, the times when you’d cover the time on your computer and not look at the clock for an hour, two hours, three hours, thinking “it must be nearly lunchtime now, I’ll have a pint, no 2 pints and this afternoon will fly by” only to find when you finally do peak a look at the clock, it’s 36 minutes after you first covered it.

They’d try to ‘motivate’ us by little incentives, “first person to complete 20 calls in an hour wins a prize” brilliant, I’ve been given a photocopied, laminated star – “what, so we cash these in for money or booze at the end of the shift yeah?” No it seems, the prize was the star, **** that.

I learned an important lesson with that job though, they were big into dangling carrots, work hard for 6 months and they’d offer you a job, not just a temp contract, oh you’d know when you were working months in advance, not just the day before – do another years and they’d make you a “team leader” oh great, same job, 50p more an hour and once a month you got to spend 30 mins being talked to so you could pass this information on, finally, if you were really good – you’d become a “team manager” no more phones for you, they were the rockstars!

Only one time one of them let slip, I said half-cut one day after work “oh, how long did you have to spend on the phones before you got your job”

“Oh, I didn’t I came in from…..” He tried to pull the words back but couldn’t mumbled something about transferring in from somewhere else, but it struck me, I’d seen lots of people come and go, it had a very high staff turnover, but never, not once, had a Team Leader become a manager, it never happened, I felt stupid and betrayed and left within 2 weeks, best thing I ever did.

The boredom gave me nightmares, the thought of going to work made me a nervous wreck, it was only the carrot they dangled and the thought of losing my first ‘proper’ job that kept me there.

I put the beveled edge on the all the steel tubes prior to them being welded and forming the structure of the White Rose Centre in Leeds.
A whole summer of grinding.

I had several jobs in a company growing vegetables in greenhouses. The REALLY (rather than ordinarily) boring ones were:

1, Tipping tomatoes, cucumbers etc onto a conveyor belt
2, Sorting out peppers from one big box into smaller boxes
3, Ensuring that when cucumbers were on a conveyor belt were, broadly speaking, perpendicular to the edge of the belt so the grader could work properly.

The last one was the dullest thing in the universe. I’d have to “correct” at most 5 a minute.

Special honourable mention to taking six tomatoes off the belt and putting them onto a tray for the bagging machine. I wasn’t dexterous enough for that 🙁

I spent 3 months sitting in a cubicle for 10 hours a day tieing figure of eight knots in bits of string. No radio, no one to talk to and a plain white wall in front of me.

After 3 months I was promoted to being the guy who cut the string into the correct length and I did another 2 months.

This was the early 90s when if you got a job you held on to it.

Summer job on a production line in a frozen foods factory sprinkling cheese on lasagnes. I don’t even like cheese

Sounds like you met the essential person spec.

I put the beveled edge on the all the steel tubes prior to them being welded and forming the structure of the White Rose Centre in Leeds.
A whole summer of grinding.

Exactly how quickly did the post-break quip “back to the grind then” get irritating?

I worked in a factory that supplied sunroofs to a car manufacturer, I had to scrape a coating off the glass using a scraper for about 9 hours a day. I lasted about 3 months. I wouldn’t mind doing a job that was so simple now.

Pour flour down hole.

I actually quite liked it.. Ipod in, shifting 25kg bags by hand, moving pallets, pretty good workout when more than one line was pulling from the hopper.

If I could get the same pay and hours I get now I’d probably go back!! Boring but completely stress free.

A old friend of mine during uni used to put the cherries on top of cherry bakewells. Later in life he once saw someone remove the cherry and eat the tart. He wasn’t best pleased!

another one, grain dryer operator, some days when not drying we got to walk the fields pulling out wild oats (not a euphemism) after cocking up and shoveling about 10t of grain in a day I started to see faces in it…

Upside is it kicked off some of my more analytical and strategic thinking

Long before faxing by computer became a thing I was a fax machine operator, using a fax machine that would jam with anything more than a single page at a time. Endless faxes being sent, me standing there feeding them in page… by page… by page… by page… I used to look over at the rows of people answering phones all day with jealousy as they at least had people to talk to.

Three months I lasted at that.

my job is pretty boring. same people coming in everyday, same conversations, have my dinner at same time daily, know to the second what time I will be home, sat on here talking shyte all day…………..I wouldn’t change a thing. money for old rope.

“money for old rope.”

Doesn’t do much for your personal development though.

We had a couple of students working for us on power station shutdowns about 15 years ago. 6 weeks of work as a shower boy which basically meant 3 times during a 12 hour shift they had to mop the showers down, layout clean towels and new bars of soap ahead of the next bunch of sweaty fitters coming off plant. The rest of the time they could read books, listen to music etc etc.

One of them left after a week which left us all speechless as they were each making a grand a week (after tax!). As a student (in fact right now!) I could easily tolerate 6 weeks of book reading books and listening to music for that kinda money!!

Gotta say..I love my job now…work for myself contracting to various haulage and distribution firms. Currently drive to wakefield and bury everynight with the odd trip into middleton before enjoying a drive across the m62 as the sun comes up (before all the nutjobs venture out) and looking longingly into the hills on the northside.

I’ve done plenty of factory work, data entry, stacking shelves but nothing was as boring as a job where I had nothing to do in the pre-internet days. I was employed to answer phones, type letters etc. The phone rang once the first day and I had one letter to mail.I lasted two days before getting a better offer (data entry of those coupons for freebies you used to get in the paper)

Doesn’t do much for your personal development though.

at 50, with no mortgage and 2 grown up kids, do you think I give a monkey’s knacker about my ‘personal development’…… 😆

One of mine was putting the walnut on walnut whips. Was quite well paid, but it’s that time when you realise it’s cheaper for nestle to pay ten people 24hrs a day rather than fix the machine that’s supposed to be doing it for the production run.
Another at the same factory was every half hour filling a bucket with melted choclate then tipping it into a hopper less than two feet from the valve. Again it was less hassle for them to pay me £10 per hour than run a length of pipe and a new valve

I got really good money as a student doing those kind of jobs and it’s amazing how many folk walked out because it was too hard