Think your job is boring? Try putting pepperoni on 14,000 pizzas every day
A worker rides a forklift past landing mats, at the Gymnova factory specialised in the gymnastics and acrobatics sports equipment, in Vieu d'Izenave, southeastern France, on August 3, 2016. PHOTO | AFP
What you need to know:
- It was noisy, my fingertips hurt, I was choked by straw dust but, above all, it was boring, boring, boring.
- Threading wires into a big, noisy machine must have seemed rivetingly exciting for some of the automata who sent in their stories.
- “I sliced slabs of cheese into four parts in a room with white walls, harsh lights and no windows."
- “I worked for weeks taking small cereal bars out of large boxes and putting the same cereal bars into small boxes.”
I once worked at a dairy where I had the most exhilarating job of my life, hurling glass bottles against a brick wall. They were all chipped or something. Dairies don’t put milk in glass bottles any more, so I guess my job, like the bottles, went to the wall.
On the down side, one hot summer I worked on a farm, and spent entire days threading metal wires into a massive baling machine that compacted and trussed hay bales for winter feed. It was noisy, my fingertips hurt, I was choked by straw dust but, above all, it was boring, boring, boring.
Naturally, my eyes lit up last week when I spotted a BBC story which asked: “What is the most boring job you have ever done?” And I have to admit, threading wires into a big, noisy machine must have seemed rivetingly exciting for some of the automata who sent in their stories.
Rob: “I sliced slabs of cheese into four parts in a room with white walls, harsh lights and no windows. At break one day, I asked what happened to my predecessor and was told he had picked up a slab of cheese, hurled it at the wall and never been seen since. I lasted nine days.”
Jude Connor: “I worked for weeks taking small cereal bars out of large boxes and putting the same cereal bars into small boxes.”
Peter Minting: “I put pepperoni on 14,000 pizzas per day at a factory in Nottingham. If the conveyor belt broke down, we made smiley faces on the pizzas with the pepperoni.”
Steven: “I worked in a plastic moulding factory producing toy heads of Frankenstein hour after hour. The boredom was so intense and the stink of hot plastic so bad that today I cannot drink out of plastic cups.”
MAKING WIRE BINDERS
Suzy: “I once spent six months stapling 400 reports every day,” and Marie: “I once had a job which consisted of taking staples out of pieces of paper.”
Simon: “Tearing strips of Sellotape from flattened cardboard boxes,” Jane: “Threading string through the holes in the top of bookmarks” and Toby: “Making the wire binders that hold calendars together, thousands every night.”
And last but not least, back to the dairy. Wrote Mark Thomas: “I had a summer job as a student squeezing plastic milk bottles for 12 hours overnight to see if they leaked. I smelt of sour milk every time I went home.”
***
Activist protests here usually consist of picket lines, loudspeaker-led chants and much waving of placards.
However, when 35 migrant workers were arrested by immigration officials and 25 removed from the country, two protest groups went a step farther.
The Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement claimed that the migrants, who were working for the Byron burger chain, were victims of entrapment by the company in collusion with the Home Office.
So they released thousands of insects in two of the chain’s burger bars in central London.
Let loose were cockroaches, locusts, crickets and grasshoppers and the restaurants in Central St Giles and Holborn were forced to close.
A Facebook statement from the protesters said: “We apologise to customers and staff for any irritation but we had to act since forced deportations are unacceptable.”
The two restaurants reopened 24 hours later after a visit from pest controllers.
***
I live in an inner suburb and take the suburban railway into town every day, often more than once. For some time, I suspected that I was having unusually bad luck with the trains, that whichever way I was travelling, the train going in the opposite direction came first.
I decided to log my journeys and this is what I found: Between July 8 and July 26, I made 44 journeys.
Thirty-one times the train that arrived first was going in the opposite direction; my train came first just 13 times. Indeed between July 18 and 23, I took 11 trains and every time my train came second.
I am no mathematician but I would have thought that my chances of being first would be more like fifty-fifty. Or do I travel in the wrong direction at the wrong times?
Can any statistician explain this little mystery?
***
A certain factory had a policy of hiring only married men. Concerned about this, a woman activist called the company boss and asked: “Why do you limit your employees to married men?”
The reply: “Our policy is to hire staff who are used to obeying orders without question, are accustomed to being shoved around, know how to keep their mouths shut and put up with anything when they are yelled at. We find these qualities only in married men.”
