The most boring job I’ve ever had is probably the one I am currently doing. I sit in a windowless office and scan paper all day. The mail comes in, I take each letter and scan it to the person it is addressed to. Over and over again. The actual letter get put into a box, with the date and put on the long line of shelving behind me. I currently have every piece of mail delivered to this office since January 28, 2011 on those shelves, just in case someone might need the original copy. My little office is too far into the bowels of the building for me to even get a radio signal, so it’s pretty silent other than the sound of typing and the massive scanner prosessing thousands of pages each hour. I’ve been doing this job for 4 years now. Save me.

I was once a telemarketer taking inbound calls for a cell phone company that noone used. Without customers the customer service was reaaalllllllly boring!!

When I was a wee lass of 11, I sat in a field under the hot summer sun and sifted heads of garlic out of the dry dirt. It was an all day job and paid by the pound. Unlike picking strawberries or blueberries, there was no reprieve from the heat, nor were there the perks of sampling your work. Worst summer job ever.

I once worked the front till of a pharmacy in a small town, I literally could take half hour naps and not get caught as no one came in. Over the summer I read over 40 books there. All i need in any given day was literally nap, snack and read…. or work on crossword or word search books. It was boring!

I do data entry for a nationwide health insurance company. (I now hate the color Blue) My job is not only boring, it’s soul sucking. About half of the data I enter is to facilitate claims getting turned down. I spend all day typing numbers, names, more numbers, addresses and yet more numbers into the slowest database ever. My inbox is constantly replenished so it never looks like I’ve made any progress. The only excitement I get is when the database crashes and then I get to start re-entering the data that crashed it. yay.

Diary of a summer mail clerk:

9 AM: Get mail.
10-11 AM: Sort (get hit on by the same full-time mail employee – give or take an hour) and deliver mail.
12 PM: Lonesome lunch.
1-2 PM: Pick-up and sort new mail.
3-4 PM: Send out mail.
5 PM: HOME!
[Go back to 9 AM the following day and repeat until the end of summer].

End of diary.

The most mind-numbing job ever: Working for the U.S. Postal Service doing data conversion. You wonder what is involved in data conversion? Eight hours or so, daily, of trying to read the chicken-scratch that people believe passes as writing on pieces of mail. Images of the almost nonsensical scribbles are scanned, then shown on a very old CRT monitor and the lucky DCO gets to figure out what the writer was writing and type it using the keyboard – but using some equally nonsensical coding. Since speed is of the essence, the DCO gets to do that several thousand times per work shift. I spent almost a year doing this. And yes, it was in a building with blocked windows so time of day was always irrelevant. Lucky me?

The most boring job I have ever had was FILING. Read label find folder stick in folder over and over again for HOURS. By the end of the days I was ready to jump in front of a moving bus just to see it would stop!

I’m a translator, and one of my jobs was at an accounting firm. I had to translate financial statements from Hebrew to English. Hundreds of pages of financial statements. It was so tedious that I started imagining that this was how my own personal hell would be. Scary, scary thought.

Thankfully it was a brief two week stint, but my worst job was shredding the file room. Reading each page, checking if it needed to be retained for historical archives, then shredding. Mind numblingly boring and I wasn’t allowed to listen to music.

The most boring job I had was working on a packaging line in a cheese factory. The cheese would come down the line and i would put the blocks in vacuum formed plastic to be sealed by the machine for ten hours a day. if there was extra blocks i had to pile it up incase the cutter could not keep up. The place smelled bad, it was loud and most days I wanted to put my hands in the sealing machine to get a break

Door to door knife salesperson

The most boring job I had was working as an office manager for an executive coaching and recruitment company. The company consisted of 4 directors who worked varying hours, often not in the office, and myself. There wasn’t enough work for 1 person, I struggled to keep myself occupied. More than half the time I’d be there on my own, but never knew when a director or client might drop in. I answered maybe 2 phone calls or emails a day, and learnt how to stretch reading the newspaper out over a 3 hour period, by reading almost every word. 6 months of this and I was going stir crazy. When I left they replaced me with a part time office manager 2 days a week, and a phone answering service.

I once applied for a job in a party shop because, well, what the hell could could be more exciting than working in a party shop??!!

I’ll tell you what’s more exciting. Anything. Watching paint dry or grass grow were two of my favourite distractions. Anyway, one of my main jobs was cleaning and when the excitement of that got too much I could move on to checking balloons for holes. Yup, I painstakingly stuck my fingers in literally HUNDREDS of balloons for days, stretching them out and looking for holes. It was awesome.

Needless to say, I didnt stay in that job for long…

I once worked as a shelf-stocker for one summer at a dollar store. Not Dollarama, that would have been fun. This one was an independant owned store that nobody ever went in, so i maybe had to stock the shelves once in a boring while for like $5 a day and there was nowhere to sit, so i had to stand by the shelves all day like an idiot with no windows and nothing to look at. I eventually just walked out, “no need to pay me for today, i’m done”. The next job I had was at an animal hospital, sanitizing needles and equipment and sorting patient files by letters, numbers, colours and deceased patients. Out of depression from that last catagory and of bordom, I used to let all the kittens out of they’re cages to run around and play with eachother, then try to remember which cages they belonged in. Just imagine like 10 kittens running wild in a 10 by 5 foot dimly lit room. That was pretty fun. I actually do love sorting. I had aspirations of being a mail sorter at the post office but it was a hard job to acquire. The most exiting thing to happen there was one of the nurses waved an amputated cat arm in my face and i was just done, never went back. But i do love repetetive tasks; sorting, assembling, packaging and delivery as long as i get some music to listen to. Sorry for the long rant

ABM processing and data entry. All day in a cubicle in a windowless concrete block of a building, punching in numbers. And I couldn’t so much as adjust my bra strap without having to show my hands to a camera so security would know I wasn’t trying to steal the money.

Haha aww, I can’t be part of this, I haven’t had a boring job. Two of the jobs themselves were super boring, hostess at a restaurant and cashier at a music store (totally not like the movie Empire Records, though we technically had a Rex Manning day because Michael Bolton came to sign his new album), but the customers made the jobs rock. So I had very few boring days.

Now I’m not a person that is easily bored so a job has to be mind-numbingly dull to make an impression. I work as a light board operator for theatrical production (plays, musicals, concerts, etc.), which requires me to push a button whenever the stage manager says “go” so that the lights change when necessary. I was working on a production of a show called “Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced,” which was pretty interesting the first couple of shows as I got to learn the plot line and the intricacies of the plot. Eventually though the show became exceeding dull after I saw the show so many times that I had most of the lines of evey character memorized and could mouth along every line. While waiting for the stage manager to tell me to go we had to sit in silence because talking would have disturbed the audience members, adding to the dullness since all we could do was watch the show. Eventually our limited run of the show ended and I started working at a different show. This one really sticks out in my mind though as I can still quote the 10 pages of accusations that the detective makes almost word for word.

probably the most boring job I ever had was working for a security company. I worked 5 days a week 17 hour shifts and did nothing. I worked for entrance to a comunity park that no one ever used. I had to sit and watch cameras and let maybe 4 people in a day. no books, no laptop, nothing but watching the cameras. I used to buy 5 energy drinks a day and drink them in the first hour just so i would be so hyper that the day would go by quicker, even though it just made me look at the clock every 10 minutes.

The most boring job I ever had was as a cook at a old folks home. I had been a cook previous but this was so tedious it hurt. My morning started off every day like most people’s, making breakfast. Except this for me was making 300 pieces of toast!! it felt like factory work. Most dishes/meals were prepared this way, I made breakfast and lunch then prepped for the dinner shift. All of my coworkers, whether due to broken spirits or social ineptitude, were terribly unfriendly. the “kitchen” I worked in was hidden away in a back corner of the basement, as if we were social pariahs only to appear when the food was ready. And to top it all off, most likely in a further attempt to crush our souls, we were located just down the hall from the “chapel”, a temporary storage place for deceased residents. Nothing quite starts your morning off at an awful job like having a reminder of death shoved in your face. I was disturbed by the sight of corpses and made assembly line food this way for over a year before I went insane and got a better job.

My most boring job? Chef on a boat. I, more or less, woke up in the morning to cook breakfast, prepare the next two meals, and go back to sleep. I’d wake up again and finish lunch and go back to sleep. I’d get up again to do dinner, maybe have a little to drink, sit around to read, and go back to sleep. I was stuck in a small cabin about 1.5m by 2.5m with a little headroom. I cooked for two other people, the boss and the helmsman. The most excitement I had was hearing the boss wake up in the middle of the night screaming from his frequent night terrors. The helmsman was a lazy old man who, when he wasn’t sitting at the helm, was sitting in the cabin drinking. I was twenty at the time and both were at least 40 years older and none of us had much to talk about. We knew our duties. One cooked, one steered, and the other complained about both the others.

The most boring job I ever had was scanning old files for a clinic switching over to a digital system- but one day there was a surprise turn of events which I’ll never forget. We had to separate out the color photos from the rest of the scanning because there was a special scanner for color- anyways, one day I’m separating and stumble across a strange picture which was like a pink and yellow tunnel, and immediately I thought “Is this a throat?” It wasn’t. I’ll let you figure out what it really was.

The most boring job i ever had was collecting postal codes from people at a theatre……

Hi, my name is Joe, and I work in a button factory. I have a wife and a dog and a family. One day, my boss comes up to me and says, “Hi Joe, are you busy?” I says, “Busy? That depends on how you define ‘busy.’ I’m doing the same thing I do every day. I come here at 5am and I clock in, and I come and sit on this stool. I sit on this stool in front of this conveyor belt and I look at buttons. All day, buttons go by: the same size, the same color, the same shape. Identical buttons. And I stare at these buttons, by the hundred, by the thousand, and I look for buttons that are broken, that only have three holes, that are the wrong color, or the wrong shape. My eyes begin to go cross after the first hour, looking at all these buttons, begging them to show me something new, something different besides shiny black eyes with four small holes. Once I found two buttons fused together, like siamese twins in a strange dance, and that was the most engaging, interesting moment I’ve had at this job.
That was nine months ago.
So whether or not what I’m doing could be defined as ‘busy,’ I’ll say no, in the hopes that you will give me something else to do, or just talk to me for a minute, or fire me, or in any way relieve the unending flood of shiny, unblinking, unforgiving black eyes.”

I worked on a kibbutz for 5 months. For my job, I worked in the laundry folding clothes and sheets from 7-3, 3 days a week. The shirts had to be folded a certain way, and each person who was in charge of the laundry(there were 3 people in charge) had a different way they thought the shirts should be folded. Pants and jeans were also a pain in the ass. Folding the sheets wasn’t so bad. They had to be put through a big ironing machine first, and if there were any wrinkles, they had to be put through again. Oh and each piece of clothing had to be sorted according to who’s number was written on it. There was also the batch of clothing that belonged to the people who were in the infirmary. Luckily, that stuff didn’t need to be sorted, just folded and then put back in the bag where it came from.

My most boring job was delivering those coupon inserts and free items in the newspaper.

My most boring job was being a telemarketer that sold stuff to companies who wanted to “enhance” there business. (Basically sitting at a cubicle with a head seat and going through managers to talk to people)

For one summer I was an archive worker In my in public library in my town, basically I was spending 8 hours a day in a basement. It was chilly there so regardless of hot summer I was sitting in a hoddie and still were cold. My boredom was a result of an interesting mixture, there was no internet there and during the two months period while I worked only one person came to see some press from 1960s. I live in an average Polish town in Upper Silesia, one of those sleepy hollows, not many people have any interest apart from sport or beer. I spent this summer sleeping and reading quite a lot. There is a sad part to this story, I could hear people having fun in the near sport field and café, I, however, had to stay put in case if someone would want to see some newspapers or press releases.

One summer I worked in a factory that made cabinets. All day I would take a piece of wood off a cart, slide it into a machine, pressed a button (which made the machine drill, glue and inserted a dowel into said hole) take the wood out and put it back on the cart. I did this all day everyday for 4 months. Once and a while I got to refill the hopper which held the dowels. Fun.

Okay, so, it wasn’t always the most boring job but man… some nights!

I used to work as an usher at the local performing arts theatre in town. I would stand at the entrance to the theatre, give people their programs and point them to their seats. I would then sit or stand at the back of the theatre through the show and wait to open the doors for the intermission or when the show was over. I know, doesn’t sound too bad right? Well, some plays would run for over two weeks and I would have to sit through night-after-night of the same terrible play, slowly memorizing the lines and trying very hard not to fall asleep. I’m not even sure how many times I’ve seen The Nutcracker now…

I’ve never had a job, but I had to stand at a booth for an organization I was volunteering with for 4 hours straight. And no one came by the booth! They people who ran it were super rude and gave me a bunch of attitude. I’m never working with them again.