Thursday, July 9, 2009

Stupidest Thing You've Ever Been Paid To Do

One of the of counsel's at the law firm I worked for retired. So, rather than get new letterhead, we got matching white out and I have spent the entire morning whiting out the guy's name.

So, what's the stupidest thing you've ever been paid to do?

8 comments:

  1. copy and cut out dog ears for the Children's Room (I would at a library)

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  2. In my other life as a publicist/event manager: Paris. Hilton. Perfume. Launch.

    'Nuff said.

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  3. One time in high school I dressed up in a full body suit as Cookie Monster for a children's fair in 90 degree weather.

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  4. A testing firm I temped for had these (internal) 6"x8" forms, their forms, mind you that they deliberately created themselves, that people had to fill out. But the firm didn't like small pieces of paper in the files. So I had to tape each form to a regular sized sheet of white paper and THEN file it. Taping small pieces of paper to larger pieces of paper beats the whiteout, I'm sorry.

    anon e mouse

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  5. I used to work for a legal publishing firm. Most hard copy legal manuals come in binders so that when a new revision to the law comes out pages can simply be swapped, added, or removed without the cost of printing up a whole new book.

    At one point we had a competitor's tax code book that had been left untouched for somewhere between three and five years while the stack of monthly updates continued to pile up next to it. One day they decided it needed to be updated and the task was given to me. I quickly realized that all those updates basically covered the exact same set of pages.

    I was also pretty sure that if I didn't have some random task to make it look like I was gainfully employed I'd soon be out of work. So I plodded through, swapping those pages as slowly as possible.

    Long story short, I lost my job anyway and the pages never did all get filed. I believe they've since outsourced that entire department to Malaysia. I really feel like I made a difference all those days I was bringing in my Creative Zen Vision: W and watching Arrested Development, Jeremiah, and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. while pretending to work...

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  6. Yeah, we have those binders. it's the receptionist's job here, to keep them busy between calls. the last receptionist knew she was leaving 6 months ahead of time, so she stopped doing them. which meant that a lot of the updates were updates of updates.

    when the new receptionist pointed that out, she was instructed to do them in order and just keep replacing the same sections again and again.

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  7. I think the stupidest thing I ever did at work was when we'd been asking for barcode labels on the sides of boxes that were accessible after packaging. It'd save time with the scanning.

    Rather than just realising that not having to move everything three times over they asked for documentation that not doing so actually saved time. Thus I spent about 4 hours of a workday on timing the scanning of a pallet of boxes with inaccessible barcodes, and the scanning of a pallet of an equal amount of boxes with accessible barcodes. Surprisingly, it turned out that the accessible barcodes made for easier and faster scanning. Whodathunkit...

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