Boring Jobs

I was discussing with my brother last night about boring jobs.  Jobs that we can’t believe how bored we were and how quickly we quit.  He worked in factories for years so I think that he has me beat as far as being bored on the job.  After all, it is one thing to have a boring job, it is an entirely different thing to be stuck in a boring job without any prospects and, because you need the job, having to stick it out.

These are some of the more boring jobs I have done:

–        Worked at Target hanging clothes on hangers.  Yes, someone has to do it but it really didn’t have to be me.  I quit after one week.

–        Worked for a carpet cleaning company doing telemarketing.  I cold called people and asked them if they needed their carpets cleaned.  I sold one job. To a professor who recognized my voice.  I quit the next day.  It was just too embarrassing and way too boring.

–        One of my jobs in New York (upstate NY) was as a secretary for a department at a university.  Since they basically needed someone to sit at a desk and answer the phone if it rang (which was rarely) and to sort through the mail once a day, I worked on my cross stitch.  They thought that was perfectly fine.  To pay me to sit and work on my own craft projects.  What was boring about that?  As much as I love cross stitch, knitting and other crafty things, it is not something I want to sit and do for eight hours a day.  It’s more something I like to do while watching TV or sitting in a Bible study at church.

–        Along the same lines, I have had numerous temp jobs where they needed a warm body to sit at a desk to answer the phone and maybe do some filing and sort mail but they didn’t want to go through the effort of training me to actually do work since I was only there temporarily.  I can’t even remember the number of companies I have worked at this way.  If I think about it, there was a trucking company, a snack goods distributor, a government contractor, some kind of sales office, and an insurance company, to name a few. Those employers didn’t want to pay me to do crafts so the job involved a lot of staring out the window.  Because that is better and more professional somehow.

This whole discussion made me really appreciate my current job.  Yes, it can be frustrating at times.  But there are very few days when I am not busy all day long.  And my job requires skill and talent and responsibility. It pays well, has full benefits and I really like the people.  All in all, not bad and certainly not boring. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had the same job for 10 years.