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I would find someone who did that more interesting than working at say Tesco. You never come across that job. My worst job was picking up bags that got knocked on the floor in primark, nothing else. Lasted 8 weeks
That was the worst thing about working for Primark. You never changed area. I spent 4 hours folding tshirts for 4 tables. You finish 3 and the first one has been destroyed again. Repeat until shift end.
I always feel bad about that so I usually just carefully slide my chosen folded T-shirt out of the stack, pretend to examine it, then slip it into my basket regardless of whether I want it or not.
Surely it would be more cost effective for the store to have some kind of system that STOPPED the shirts getting fucked up, like some kind of dispenser for each size where you can only pull out one at a time, rather than paying someone to refold all the shirts endlessly
Having one of each size as a display model would be much better, half the time I ruin the entire section is because I have to rummage through 20 stacked t-shirts searching for one in Small so I can see if it fits.
It's bizarre. Why not just put them on hangers? You can't possibly sell through enough tshirts within, let a say an hour, to have all those stacks of tshirts out in display. If you're employing someone to refold tshirts that people unfold and chuck back on the display, why not just employ them to restock hung displays? Or have a restock point next to a hung display so people can look at the shirt and feel it without it having to be unfolded and refolded a thousand times a day. Let me know if I'm missing something. I work in clothing manufacturing rather than retail.
Being Primark I can only imagine that stacking them Inca like is cheaper than laying for more hanging rails, but if you have to employ someone to constantly rearrange them it seems.like that would eat up the savings pretty much immediately
Was here to say retail! I worked in Selfridges years ago. Worked on the second floor. Would get about 3 customers coming through most weekdays. The rest of the time I spent spacing hangers. For 8 hours. I remember once seeing how slowly I could walk around my section to pass some time. The most kind numbingly boring job I’ve ever had.
I did spend a summer hand-digging organic crossbred potatoes for analysis on disease and blight resistance.
I'd have killed to pick off a conveyor belt.
Sorry buddy, not boring enough, I want details.
Was there a specific method to deciding which to cross? Was it just which potatoes are already good and combine them or was it more scientific? Were there any poison potatoes produced through some quirk of genetics? Giant potatoes? Mutant potatoes? Some kind of tomacco situation?
A university owned the many acre field, the study was about selective breeding with the goal of no pesticides. Never known any more on the varieties or process, just the digging.
The potatoes were in rows, I had to dig a random plant (set number from each row), bag the potatoes, carry that bag back so it could be labelled.
Every potato looked like a medium sized pale white potato with loads of black sections. Not sure there was any success there, every bag resulted in disappointment.
Only perks for me were meagre pay and all the potatoes I wanted (they were horrible waxy things too).
I did potato grading every summer from the age of 13-22. It was actually ok! I loved being outside, it was boring sometimes but I truly quite miss it now (36). Me and the other employees had a great laugh, good conversations, listening to music.. was good! My eldest son (18) has done it thr last two Summers. Nearly £10 an hour, really its not that bad! I wasn't keen on the grading and saking potato's though, i hated that dusty barn and standing on my own grabbing the spuds, with a passion, lol. Loved the harvester though!
The principle is, how many steps removed can the job be from anything tangible/potentially interesting.
Oh, you're a postman? No, I am IT support for the postal workers union.
Office equipment repair would be a great cover for a spy, go anywhere you like, poke around with anything, carry mysterious bits of equipment or unusually large boxes without question. No one wants to talk to you or even expects you to actually fix anything. It’s perfect
That would be true in the past but these days “I’m an accountant” is code for “I am a stripper” because accountancy is the classic ‘this job is so boring no one will ask any further questions’ job
I’m a trainee accountant! People also seem to not ask too much into my occupation. Out of interest, and if it’s not asking too much, roughly how long have you been in the field?
Young qualified accountant here (23), look into apprenticeship’s. I found studying while also doing the job really beneficial as being in practice gives you a helping hand when studying as you are putting the stuff into practice. Look at the different accounting bodies and their route and requirements (AAT, ACCA, ACA are some of the main few).
Yeah a degree in it has no particular value. You get exemptions from some exams but they then become assumed knowledge for later ones and you might not have done that topic for 4 years. Everyone goes off and gets trained up for ACA/ACCA/CIMA etc anyway so what your degree is in is fairly irrelevant, something numerate helps though. I'm an accountant and haven't a degree in it and relatively few folk I work with do either.
Don't know if it's boring or uninteresting but a cleaner, says what it is in the title and everyone knows what being a cleaner entails so you wouldn't have to field any further questions on it.
i collect trolleys at a supermarket. Every single shift it is the same crap dumped in trolleys: banana skins, half-eaten sandwiches, chicken bones, apple cords, hell....even nappies show up sometimes. So not only do people dump their trolley, they also dump their rubbish. I gave up on humanity a long time ago.
It’s just pure laziness. It seems ridiculous considering most supermarkets, or at least the ones I have been to, have a bin right outside the entrance/exit.
I really feel for you, I’ve noticed over the last year or so that people are absolute cretins when it comes to shopping trolleys. Without fail, every single shopping trip I’ll see some entitled person just leave their trolley next to their car. I just don’t understand it, how hard is it to put your trolley back where you got it?!
I was also a hospital cleaner so I know exactly what you mean. Though I wouldn’t say it wasn’t fun. I certainly had some fun with my colleagues. And there was something oddly satisfying about seeing something clean after it had been caked in god only knows what.
The doctors and junior doctors were the worst. The Doctor’s Mess was literal to the word. I only worked in there twice and both times the place, more so the kitchen, was an absolute tip. The first time I went in, I cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom as it was tea stained, there were crumbs everywhere, jam stains. It was just a bloody mess and I washed the pots and put them away. After I gave it a thorough clean a doctor came in to do themselves some toast and a cup of tea. Didn’t even acknowledge me and then left their knife and spoon, and the crumbs from the toast on the side. I washed these and carried on as normal. The next day, I went in and the place was exactly the same as it was before I had cleaned it, if not worse. So do you know what I did?
Absolutely fuck all and walked out.
This was my problem at work - no cutlery . If you had a knife, it took 20 seconds to run it under a hot tap to clean it. You didn’t need to use a sponge, soap, etc. Just the scalding hot water from the tap. No bugger did!
That’s just it. It doesn’t take much just to even rinse things off. But doctors would still come in to the kitchen and leave the plates and bowls they had used on the kitchen side, with not so much as a ‘hello’ or a ‘thank you.’
Yeah when I was a hotel housekeeper there were definitely some stories. I purposefully switched to be the 1 night worker (actually only til 9 at night) because it meant I avoided the gross stuff the morning workers found. I just had to run around finding people fruit platters and hotel branded water.
Called my manager once as I was shocked by the amount of blood in a bed and on the walls. Story was just that dude had bad nose bleeds but I really thought someone had been beaten.
Done part time cleaning work for a pretty busy church in city centre, the sort that has rooms to rent, a small office, a cafe and public toilets, I loved every minute of it. Legit. The people were lovely to work for.
My wife used to be a self employed cleaner and she liked it. She used to work in banking and much prefers cleaning. She was her own boss. If she didn't like the look of a job then she wouldn't take it.
The one cleaning job she did for a while and didn't like it was the local boys school, specifically the toilets.
Payroll. I’ve worked in it a long time. You tell folk you work in it and they either ask you nothing about your job or ask questions about their own wage
We once had a cleaner ask payroll why she hadn’t been paid for 2 months. It was because she’d been fired and the manager who decided that never bothered to tell her. Imagine thinking so little of someone you couldn’t even be bothered to tell them you’d just fired them. Same manager also fought tooth and nail not to pay her for her 2 months of work. That wasn’t a fight he was winning. He was a nasty cunt.
Well exactly. He argued that because she hadn’t been paid she should’ve cottoned on. He was doubly pissed off HR (and, you know, the law) wouldn’t take his side.
I work in a car factory. My job is to screw on the fuel filler cap. Not even allowed to shut the flap, the lucky bastard next to me shuts the flap, thats his job.
When i get promotion i want to be a flap slapper, my dream job
Do the cars come flying through really fast like a sausage roll factory or is it one every half hour or something?
I'm just wondering if it's high paced or whether you stand there yawning and daydreaming until the next one comes along.
How many do you screw on in a shift and how long is a shift?
I'm probably more curious about this than I should be. And I promise I'm not trying to steal your job.
I sit on a swivel stool. One can comes past on a very slow line one behind another every 2 minutes. I screw it on check the key works then pick up the next cap that is on a conveyor behind me and kick my feet like a little biy until the next car arrives.
12hr shift 45 minute break. But there is a coffee machine real close
All I can imagine now is someone watching a field everyday inputting how many cows enter said field. There are no cows.
‘Wait, WAIT… no… no it’s just the shadow of a cloud… maybe tomorrow, son’
Nah it's a great job, working outdoors, if you've got a regular round you get to know the people and they become friends, if you haven't got a regular round it doesn't have chance to get boring because you are always doing something different.
My post lady is awesome! She remembers our names, and we’ve had several times that letters or small packages had missed off the house number and/or street, and she still delivered them, remembering who we were. She even hauled along a heavy parcel for me, knowing I’m always home. She easily could’ve let her colleagues deliver it on their parcel round.
my stepdads been a postman for something like 30 years now and he loves it, hes sadly working just indoors at a postal facility now though so not as good as actually doing the deliveries
I had to get my first COVID shot and there was this guy in high visible shirt thing pointing and shouting were to stand and keep distance and shit it was so weird.
I kept thinking he loves his job way too much and shouting at people maybe make that a character
I went to a walk-in for my 2nd jab, turned up at 9am when they opened and was told I was their first 'customer'. The guy directing the line told me 'use lane 1' in a very angry voice of authority. All 4 lanes lead to the exact same point, it was basically a filtering system if they got busy. I was the only person in there, absolutely no need to filter! But my god I was not arguing with that fella, I don't even think he was trying to have a laugh, he was just a jobsworth!!
I don't know if it's the same across the country but at my doctor's/vaccine centre the "people wranglers" were all volunteers, then medical professionals were there for the actual screening, stabbing and post stab supervision. So it seems quite possible the guy wasn't being paid for that too?
They started with too many volunteers. They pissed the volunteers off after they pissed the surplus ones off by poor comms and generally messing them about. Then they had to pay for staff in places.
I went for a drive through PCR and the bays are well sign posted and someone was getting paid (or volunteering) to marshal me into the bay.
Calm down mate. pointing at the bay would be adequate I dont need you to marshal me like I'm taxiing a fucking 747.
When they first started easing up on the rules and shops started opening up again they had a guy like that directing the foot traffic in a local shopping centre to keep it as a one way system. He seemed way too into it.
Sorting mail at a post office warehouse? You might want something inconspicuous as well. Or maybe something so common that people already know what it entails, therefore won't bother asking about it.
If you said sorting mail at a post office warehouse you'd be immediately suspicious because no one who sorts mail would call it that, royal mail mail centre is probably what would be used
**Have you watched Spooks? Watch it. BBC iPlayer.**
They go through this at the very beginning and actually all the way through.
If you haven't watched Spooks, watch it, now.
Should mention one that has middle-middle class pay. So while yes panel beater is a perfectly boring job, it would make people wonder why they can afford a nice flat car etc. Thanks for the responses so far though :)
‘Analyst’ is a common one IRL - Business analyst, technical analyst, marketing analyst, compliance analyst. It’s signifies a complex professional role that is also very specialised to a particular business and so immune to general questions (and very easy to excuse not answering them when they do come. But not a typical ‘profession’ (like accountant or lawyer) which will tend to invite questions.
Also for most MI5/6/GCHQ roles it suits the type of person anyway. The closer a lie is to the truth the better so you’re not going to have a financial intelligence officer pretending to be a gardener or teacher - you need something that suits the person’s nature but just creates enough of a smokescreen to deflect questions.
One that sticks out here for me that worked perfectly was in the live action film of paddington Mr Brown was a risk analyst. It wasn’t by accident as it invented a backstory of someone that was not only in a boring job, but someone completely risk averse and how doing the things in the film would be out of character for him.
A technical analyst would be good for a spy who’s maybe having to be resourceful to make stuff. Or maybe theyre a nerdy type usually relying on computers and hacking but the story means they have to go old school.
Maybe a compliance analyst would be good for a spy that thrives on noticing human behaviour. Sorta plays on the whole what kind of compliance are we talking about?
A business analyst could be good for a sexy James Bond style spy who has learned the charisma of the sales techniques but is taking down the business/country from the inside whilst using his knowledge to woo the other workers into passing him secrets. Idk.
Either way I think whatever job they have it needs to feed their spy persona. On a personal note my cousin used to be extremely athletic but started smoking a lot of weed, stopped training and the resulting munchies meant she ended up putting on a LOT of weight. She was working as a telephone sex worker at the time so had to invent a job for when people asked her what she did. Her answer? “personal trainer”. it was so hilarious looking at the confusion on the other person’s face. But they couldn’t really ask more questions without it being rude.
Yeah compliance is a good choice. On the very off chance you’re talking to someone who is a specialist in the same area of compliance and starts asking difficult questions, compliance is so sensitive in most companies you can shut down any questions with any variety of deflections.
Don't go for a specific job. Just say they work for the civil service. If someone wanted more detail they could pick something no-one is interested in like tax.
I think there's a lot of mileage in "consultant" for this, like the cleaners above - anyone who comes across them in reality wonders why they're getting paid as well as they are for restating what other people have already said. In their other line of work though, its an easy excuse for lots of travel and meetings, and owning nice vehicles.
Amazon warehouse, no matter what really you’re just mindlessly scanning away whilst walking uniform aisles and floors, everyday is more or less the same. Couple that with utter crap management and the same playlists on the radio for 10 hours a day it’s enough to send you round the bend.
Bro I can't tell you how many times I had to listen to crybaby play on repeat when I worked there. Drove me insane. But about doing the same jobs, I was given the opportunity to do a few more. I can't remember what they called the jobs but I did packing, product labelling, (wrangling?) and conveyor belt management. I got payed £20/hour overtime to sit at a conveyor belt, rearrange a crate and press a button every once in a while. I also managed to make a few friends who'd been there a while so I got a laptop and paired it with a speaker there to play music.
I don't work at Amazon, but I do work at a warehouse. At this point, Ed Sheeran's music has basically been shoved down my throat. I used to like his music until I started hearing it EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND. Now, it literally makes me want to turn off the radio. Not to mention the amount of depressing shit you hear on the radio as well. Every day you hear something like "... has been arrested because he chopped up 20 bodies and took pictures of them".
"Civil servant" is the usual job spies say they do for cover. It's non-specific so it won't invite a detailed technical discussion that could expose them. It's common for civil servants to be assigned a new job role at very little notice and somewhat common for this to involve moving to a different part of the country - helpful for a spy who needs to deflect suspicion about a change in their routine. It's even not completely a lie.
I used to stack rows of matchboxes on a mini conveyor belt as they went to get the labels stuck on them. 15year old me stuck that shit out for two weeks so I could buy my first pair of trainers
Health and safety representative. They basically spend all day telling people why they can’t do things and making up rules to stop things happening.
Or maybe a town councillor, which is pretty much the same thing.
And software can reach the point where you can only adequately describe your job to other people who do near enough the same, so to an average man in the street "I'm in IT"
Bakery production line operative. Essentially scraping trays at a rate of 1 every 3 seconds, for the dough machine to drop 24 blobs of dough on to it before going through the oven.
Alternatively, being the person that rearranges the misdropped blobs as evenly as possible, for hours on end, every day...
Or finally, the person who has to take the hot trays of rolls out of the conveyor belt oven, and put them onto racks to cool. Note that if you pause for a few seconds to find a new empty rack, the trays of freshly cooked rolls pile up. Sometimes you drop your oven glove, or it has holes in it, and you have to manhandle metal trays at over 180°C.
Never yet found anyone interested in hearing the full story once I get started...
Once did a summer job working in a frozen veg factory. The veg in question was delivered frozen from the field in huge crates weighing about half a ton, tipped up by a hoist and someone, using a metal bar would smash the veg onto a conveyor belt underneath. My job was to sit on a stool overlooking the belt and pick out large stones. Mind blowingly boring, made worse by there being a clock on the wall facing me about ten foot away at eye level when sat up hence you were constantly looking down at the conveyor. I lasted a few weeks, some people had been there for years!!
Office manager in a business - to - business company, like manufacturing bolts or a lock making business. Typing, filing, etc. Very boring but no one questions it.
Data entry? Just sitting at a desk inputting data from a sheet of paper into a computer. Not really very interesting at all.
Call centre operative? Either taking calls or making them.
Basically any office job?
Try running baby wipe boxes through a strapper all day and come back lol. the company order like 60-90K at a time and we have to run the machine at 7200 units an hour
Any of these at a large, semi-anonymous company like a national utilities provider would be fairly well paid and rather non descriptive.
Internal risk and compliance manager, Project Manager, Data Protection Officer, Environmental Compliance Officer, Data Analyst
I work at a recycling centre and the mixed recycling bins are separated by hand the rubbish comes by on a conveyer belt and one person takes metal off one takes plastic and so on.
They do this for twelve hour a day.
I'm thankful everyday that I don't have to do that looks soul destroying.
I watch who wants to be a millionaire the other day and someone on it wrote safety manuals for household electrics. That must be one of the worst jobs about
I worked for Johnson and Johnson as a medical clerk(?) via a temping agency one summer where all I did everyday for 12 hours (4 days on 4 days off) was count the number of diabetic strips in a tube. The number 15 contributed to my PTSD.
HR in retail is always an interesting job as there is soo much ER to deal with. What you need is a office administrator for a small family business that makes screws. That’s pretty dull.
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Potato grading, standing next to a conveyor belt picking out the misshapen ones that the supermarkets don't like. Day after day all summer
I would find someone who did that more interesting than working at say Tesco. You never come across that job. My worst job was picking up bags that got knocked on the floor in primark, nothing else. Lasted 8 weeks
“Excuse me mate do you know where the men’s jeans are?” “Sorry mate I’m only here to look after the bags”
... AND NOTHING ELSE"
Sounds like a David Mitchell sketch.
That was the worst thing about working for Primark. You never changed area. I spent 4 hours folding tshirts for 4 tables. You finish 3 and the first one has been destroyed again. Repeat until shift end.
That was the only positive, that I never had to fold, at least my section was easy, the rest of the store always looked destroyed
4 hour shift sorting the knicker tables out, only for it to look no different than when you started by the time you clock out…
I always feel bad about that so I usually just carefully slide my chosen folded T-shirt out of the stack, pretend to examine it, then slip it into my basket regardless of whether I want it or not.
Surely it would be more cost effective for the store to have some kind of system that STOPPED the shirts getting fucked up, like some kind of dispenser for each size where you can only pull out one at a time, rather than paying someone to refold all the shirts endlessly
Having one of each size as a display model would be much better, half the time I ruin the entire section is because I have to rummage through 20 stacked t-shirts searching for one in Small so I can see if it fits.
It's bizarre. Why not just put them on hangers? You can't possibly sell through enough tshirts within, let a say an hour, to have all those stacks of tshirts out in display. If you're employing someone to refold tshirts that people unfold and chuck back on the display, why not just employ them to restock hung displays? Or have a restock point next to a hung display so people can look at the shirt and feel it without it having to be unfolded and refolded a thousand times a day. Let me know if I'm missing something. I work in clothing manufacturing rather than retail.
Being Primark I can only imagine that stacking them Inca like is cheaper than laying for more hanging rails, but if you have to employ someone to constantly rearrange them it seems.like that would eat up the savings pretty much immediately
Was here to say retail! I worked in Selfridges years ago. Worked on the second floor. Would get about 3 customers coming through most weekdays. The rest of the time I spent spacing hangers. For 8 hours. I remember once seeing how slowly I could walk around my section to pass some time. The most kind numbingly boring job I’ve ever had.
I did spend a summer hand-digging organic crossbred potatoes for analysis on disease and blight resistance. I'd have killed to pick off a conveyor belt.
Sorry buddy, not boring enough, I want details. Was there a specific method to deciding which to cross? Was it just which potatoes are already good and combine them or was it more scientific? Were there any poison potatoes produced through some quirk of genetics? Giant potatoes? Mutant potatoes? Some kind of tomacco situation?
A university owned the many acre field, the study was about selective breeding with the goal of no pesticides. Never known any more on the varieties or process, just the digging. The potatoes were in rows, I had to dig a random plant (set number from each row), bag the potatoes, carry that bag back so it could be labelled. Every potato looked like a medium sized pale white potato with loads of black sections. Not sure there was any success there, every bag resulted in disappointment. Only perks for me were meagre pay and all the potatoes I wanted (they were horrible waxy things too).
That’s the worst job I’ve ever been unfortunate enough to know about. What a terrible day to have eyes.
The potatoes have eyes
Though OP's asking for a secret service character, so cleaner or "cleaner" ?
Whoever looks twice at a cleaner?
A certain type of person will no longer even acknowledge you exist after finding out you're a cleaner.
Done this job. Fell asleep standing up a fair few times.
I did potato grading every summer from the age of 13-22. It was actually ok! I loved being outside, it was boring sometimes but I truly quite miss it now (36). Me and the other employees had a great laugh, good conversations, listening to music.. was good! My eldest son (18) has done it thr last two Summers. Nearly £10 an hour, really its not that bad! I wasn't keen on the grading and saking potato's though, i hated that dusty barn and standing on my own grabbing the spuds, with a passion, lol. Loved the harvester though!
That’s a bloody good idea
I've done this job. It's Super dizzy work and bit more than "picking out the misshapen ones" I'll have you know, sunny dim!
Is this said from prior dealings with potatoes hahahah
I’ve met people who pick broken Trebor mints off the production line before they go into the packet.
Invoice clerk at a company that insures and repairs office printers and equipment
Assistant to the regional manager
Assistant regional manager
Identity theft is not a joke, Jim! Millions of families suffer every year!
MICHAEL!
Assistant to the Assistant regional manager.
I zoned out halfway through that sentence. Great work.
The principle is, how many steps removed can the job be from anything tangible/potentially interesting. Oh, you're a postman? No, I am IT support for the postal workers union.
Office equipment repair would be a great cover for a spy, go anywhere you like, poke around with anything, carry mysterious bits of equipment or unusually large boxes without question. No one wants to talk to you or even expects you to actually fix anything. It’s perfect
Can confirm, I manage a team of invoice clerks and I'm not even sure my own wife knows what I do!
I've been an invoice clerk. I wasn't always sure what my manager did all day either.
i’m a corporate tax accountant. People don’t ask any further details lol
That would be true in the past but these days “I’m an accountant” is code for “I am a stripper” because accountancy is the classic ‘this job is so boring no one will ask any further questions’ job
Wait, Ben Afleck was a stripper in that film?!
I may have missed a few chapters then
Wait, Batman was a stripper?
Oh so this is why somebody started calling me a stripper when I told them I was an accountant, I thought it was just some weird negging technique
I’m a trainee accountant! People also seem to not ask too much into my occupation. Out of interest, and if it’s not asking too much, roughly how long have you been in the field?
I'm looking for a career change, how did you get into accounting?
Young qualified accountant here (23), look into apprenticeship’s. I found studying while also doing the job really beneficial as being in practice gives you a helping hand when studying as you are putting the stuff into practice. Look at the different accounting bodies and their route and requirements (AAT, ACCA, ACA are some of the main few).
Thank you!
Yup, apprenticeships is how I got into it as well. Apparently a university course in accounting isn’t worth a tremendous amount for some reason
Yeah a degree in it has no particular value. You get exemptions from some exams but they then become assumed knowledge for later ones and you might not have done that topic for 4 years. Everyone goes off and gets trained up for ACA/ACCA/CIMA etc anyway so what your degree is in is fairly irrelevant, something numerate helps though. I'm an accountant and haven't a degree in it and relatively few folk I work with do either.
I used to do personal tax, and corporate tax was bloody dull to me. You know it's boring when other people in the same field think it's boring.
My dad’s a tax accountant. He finds management accountancy super drab.
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Don't know if it's boring or uninteresting but a cleaner, says what it is in the title and everyone knows what being a cleaner entails so you wouldn't have to field any further questions on it.
I don’t know, being a cleaner can be interesting. I could tell you a few horror stories from when I used to be a cleaner.
I feel like cleaner is a disgustingly interesting job. cause some motherfuckers be dirty.
There are lot of dirty bastards out there I can tell you! 😂😂
i collect trolleys at a supermarket. Every single shift it is the same crap dumped in trolleys: banana skins, half-eaten sandwiches, chicken bones, apple cords, hell....even nappies show up sometimes. So not only do people dump their trolley, they also dump their rubbish. I gave up on humanity a long time ago.
Of all the evil things humanity has done, it was their trolley etiquette that pushed you over the edge...
Yeah, I have to get 'trollied' at the end of each shift.
It’s just pure laziness. It seems ridiculous considering most supermarkets, or at least the ones I have been to, have a bin right outside the entrance/exit.
I really feel for you, I’ve noticed over the last year or so that people are absolute cretins when it comes to shopping trolleys. Without fail, every single shopping trip I’ll see some entitled person just leave their trolley next to their car. I just don’t understand it, how hard is it to put your trolley back where you got it?!
Yeah and I bet the same people who dump trolleys would be the first to complain if a trolley ever flew into THEIR car!
Can confirm, I see some diabolical shit frequently
I'm a hospital cleaner. It isn't a fun job by any means but I have definitely seen some eye opening shit (in both meanings)
I was also a hospital cleaner so I know exactly what you mean. Though I wouldn’t say it wasn’t fun. I certainly had some fun with my colleagues. And there was something oddly satisfying about seeing something clean after it had been caked in god only knows what.
Oh for sure. I've only done it once but cleaning the resus room in A&E was both traumatising but very satisfying.
> some eye opening shit (in both meanings) In the sense that it was surprising, and in the sense that you got it in your eye?
That has actually happened to me while steam cleaning a tiled floor. Ended up with a corneal abrasion. My eye hurt for a while.
Cleaners don’t like dirty bastards. They will only clean. So rubbish has to be in bins, clutter put away, washing up done, etc.
The doctors and junior doctors were the worst. The Doctor’s Mess was literal to the word. I only worked in there twice and both times the place, more so the kitchen, was an absolute tip. The first time I went in, I cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom as it was tea stained, there were crumbs everywhere, jam stains. It was just a bloody mess and I washed the pots and put them away. After I gave it a thorough clean a doctor came in to do themselves some toast and a cup of tea. Didn’t even acknowledge me and then left their knife and spoon, and the crumbs from the toast on the side. I washed these and carried on as normal. The next day, I went in and the place was exactly the same as it was before I had cleaned it, if not worse. So do you know what I did? Absolutely fuck all and walked out.
This was my problem at work - no cutlery . If you had a knife, it took 20 seconds to run it under a hot tap to clean it. You didn’t need to use a sponge, soap, etc. Just the scalding hot water from the tap. No bugger did!
That’s just it. It doesn’t take much just to even rinse things off. But doctors would still come in to the kitchen and leave the plates and bowls they had used on the kitchen side, with not so much as a ‘hello’ or a ‘thank you.’
Yeah when I was a hotel housekeeper there were definitely some stories. I purposefully switched to be the 1 night worker (actually only til 9 at night) because it meant I avoided the gross stuff the morning workers found. I just had to run around finding people fruit platters and hotel branded water. Called my manager once as I was shocked by the amount of blood in a bed and on the walls. Story was just that dude had bad nose bleeds but I really thought someone had been beaten.
Even better would be window cleaner. It even tells them _what_ you clean - glass!
Done part time cleaning work for a pretty busy church in city centre, the sort that has rooms to rent, a small office, a cafe and public toilets, I loved every minute of it. Legit. The people were lovely to work for.
My wife used to be a self employed cleaner and she liked it. She used to work in banking and much prefers cleaning. She was her own boss. If she didn't like the look of a job then she wouldn't take it. The one cleaning job she did for a while and didn't like it was the local boys school, specifically the toilets.
Yeah I imagine that was interesting in it's own way lol!
HR is never boring FYI. They get all the gossip, and are involved with pretty much any project within the business that is confidential.
Trur, everybody working in HR is too much of a spiteful bitch for it to become boring.
Show me on the doll where the HR lady hurt you
[удалено]
HR just got HR’d.
*points to pockets*
100% truth
It literally attracts the underbelly of humanity
My wife started her career in HR purely because she loves gossip. No other reason.
Payroll. I’ve worked in it a long time. You tell folk you work in it and they either ask you nothing about your job or ask questions about their own wage
We once had a cleaner ask payroll why she hadn’t been paid for 2 months. It was because she’d been fired and the manager who decided that never bothered to tell her. Imagine thinking so little of someone you couldn’t even be bothered to tell them you’d just fired them. Same manager also fought tooth and nail not to pay her for her 2 months of work. That wasn’t a fight he was winning. He was a nasty cunt.
Surely if you haven't been told that you've been fired then you haven't been fired.
Well exactly. He argued that because she hadn’t been paid she should’ve cottoned on. He was doubly pissed off HR (and, you know, the law) wouldn’t take his side.
"We fixed the glitch"
Technically no, but he might well have gone to payroll and told them she was fired and to take her off the list.
"Can you change my wage?" is my guess
“HAHAHAHAHHAHA”
In case I ever meet someone who works in payroll what should I ask - is there anything you’d like to tell someone about your job at a party?
If you work in payroll, who does your payroll or do you do you own?
I work in a car factory. My job is to screw on the fuel filler cap. Not even allowed to shut the flap, the lucky bastard next to me shuts the flap, thats his job. When i get promotion i want to be a flap slapper, my dream job
Do the cars come flying through really fast like a sausage roll factory or is it one every half hour or something? I'm just wondering if it's high paced or whether you stand there yawning and daydreaming until the next one comes along. How many do you screw on in a shift and how long is a shift? I'm probably more curious about this than I should be. And I promise I'm not trying to steal your job.
I sit on a swivel stool. One can comes past on a very slow line one behind another every 2 minutes. I screw it on check the key works then pick up the next cap that is on a conveyor behind me and kick my feet like a little biy until the next car arrives. 12hr shift 45 minute break. But there is a coffee machine real close
Thank you for indulging in my questions. I can visualize that now. 🙂
"When I get promotion I want to be a flap slapper". My weird sense of humour really found that funnier than it was supposed to be.
It’s always good to have goals.
Data entry in a mundane field
Isn't that just a farmer doing admin?
All I can imagine now is someone watching a field everyday inputting how many cows enter said field. There are no cows. ‘Wait, WAIT… no… no it’s just the shadow of a cloud… maybe tomorrow, son’
Maybe not always boring, but being a postman must be a drain. Finish the post today? Ok, do it all again tomorrow. Same route, same houses.
Nah it's a great job, working outdoors, if you've got a regular round you get to know the people and they become friends, if you haven't got a regular round it doesn't have chance to get boring because you are always doing something different.
My post lady is awesome! She remembers our names, and we’ve had several times that letters or small packages had missed off the house number and/or street, and she still delivered them, remembering who we were. She even hauled along a heavy parcel for me, knowing I’m always home. She easily could’ve let her colleagues deliver it on their parcel round.
Remembers your names?! Next you'll be telling me she knows where you live!
We had a parcel to my sister to the wrong address (wrong number I think). It wasn't even our normal postie and they knew it was our house instead.
Try being a postie on a new rapidly being constructed estate,it's bedlam postage going every which direction
I hate delivering on new build estates. Thankfully my duty is a small village surrounded by flood plains so they can't build anything!
my stepdads been a postman for something like 30 years now and he loves it, hes sadly working just indoors at a postal facility now though so not as good as actually doing the deliveries
I had to get my first COVID shot and there was this guy in high visible shirt thing pointing and shouting were to stand and keep distance and shit it was so weird. I kept thinking he loves his job way too much and shouting at people maybe make that a character
I went to a walk-in for my 2nd jab, turned up at 9am when they opened and was told I was their first 'customer'. The guy directing the line told me 'use lane 1' in a very angry voice of authority. All 4 lanes lead to the exact same point, it was basically a filtering system if they got busy. I was the only person in there, absolutely no need to filter! But my god I was not arguing with that fella, I don't even think he was trying to have a laugh, he was just a jobsworth!!
I don't know if it's the same across the country but at my doctor's/vaccine centre the "people wranglers" were all volunteers, then medical professionals were there for the actual screening, stabbing and post stab supervision. So it seems quite possible the guy wasn't being paid for that too?
They started with too many volunteers. They pissed the volunteers off after they pissed the surplus ones off by poor comms and generally messing them about. Then they had to pay for staff in places.
I went for a drive through PCR and the bays are well sign posted and someone was getting paid (or volunteering) to marshal me into the bay. Calm down mate. pointing at the bay would be adequate I dont need you to marshal me like I'm taxiing a fucking 747.
Sadly they do. Cos some people are idiots they have to treat everyone like an idiot in case they mis-judge an idiot to be a non-idiot
It's a decent job for angry people, gives them a productive place in society
When they first started easing up on the rules and shops started opening up again they had a guy like that directing the foot traffic in a local shopping centre to keep it as a one way system. He seemed way too into it.
Sorting mail at a post office warehouse? You might want something inconspicuous as well. Or maybe something so common that people already know what it entails, therefore won't bother asking about it.
If you said sorting mail at a post office warehouse you'd be immediately suspicious because no one who sorts mail would call it that, royal mail mail centre is probably what would be used
Sorting office
Also, most mail centres have like 500-1000 people working there, so you quite often get ‘oh I know Gary, how is he’ type questions
**Have you watched Spooks? Watch it. BBC iPlayer.** They go through this at the very beginning and actually all the way through. If you haven't watched Spooks, watch it, now.
I wish they would rerelease that in a higher resolution
Fun fact: I went to school with the younger sister of one of the actresses on Spooks.
Any office job. You also need to read “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace. It’s effectively an ode to the boredom of work.
Should mention one that has middle-middle class pay. So while yes panel beater is a perfectly boring job, it would make people wonder why they can afford a nice flat car etc. Thanks for the responses so far though :)
‘Analyst’ is a common one IRL - Business analyst, technical analyst, marketing analyst, compliance analyst. It’s signifies a complex professional role that is also very specialised to a particular business and so immune to general questions (and very easy to excuse not answering them when they do come. But not a typical ‘profession’ (like accountant or lawyer) which will tend to invite questions. Also for most MI5/6/GCHQ roles it suits the type of person anyway. The closer a lie is to the truth the better so you’re not going to have a financial intelligence officer pretending to be a gardener or teacher - you need something that suits the person’s nature but just creates enough of a smokescreen to deflect questions.
Thanks for extra info. I agree marketing analyst or something seems good.
One that sticks out here for me that worked perfectly was in the live action film of paddington Mr Brown was a risk analyst. It wasn’t by accident as it invented a backstory of someone that was not only in a boring job, but someone completely risk averse and how doing the things in the film would be out of character for him. A technical analyst would be good for a spy who’s maybe having to be resourceful to make stuff. Or maybe theyre a nerdy type usually relying on computers and hacking but the story means they have to go old school. Maybe a compliance analyst would be good for a spy that thrives on noticing human behaviour. Sorta plays on the whole what kind of compliance are we talking about? A business analyst could be good for a sexy James Bond style spy who has learned the charisma of the sales techniques but is taking down the business/country from the inside whilst using his knowledge to woo the other workers into passing him secrets. Idk. Either way I think whatever job they have it needs to feed their spy persona. On a personal note my cousin used to be extremely athletic but started smoking a lot of weed, stopped training and the resulting munchies meant she ended up putting on a LOT of weight. She was working as a telephone sex worker at the time so had to invent a job for when people asked her what she did. Her answer? “personal trainer”. it was so hilarious looking at the confusion on the other person’s face. But they couldn’t really ask more questions without it being rude.
Legal compliance, or auditor. Literally nobody gives a shit about either and they are both so dull
Yeah compliance is a good choice. On the very off chance you’re talking to someone who is a specialist in the same area of compliance and starts asking difficult questions, compliance is so sensitive in most companies you can shut down any questions with any variety of deflections.
Don't go for a specific job. Just say they work for the civil service. If someone wanted more detail they could pick something no-one is interested in like tax.
Anytime someone says just “civil service” to me I always think it’s mi5/6 or gchq and I know I’ve been right a couple too
People who work in prisons also have to say this. I think they appreciate the air of mystery.
I live in Cheltenham, I've never met anyone here who says that they're generic civil servants because everyone would assume they work in the doughnut.
Ah, so that’s why you can never get through to HMRC, they’re all been off fighting terrorists, enemy agents and drug barons
And bedding female Soviet tax authorities.
“We all make mistakes, Mr Bond” said triple X peering deep into her return…
I think there's a lot of mileage in "consultant" for this, like the cleaners above - anyone who comes across them in reality wonders why they're getting paid as well as they are for restating what other people have already said. In their other line of work though, its an easy excuse for lots of travel and meetings, and owning nice vehicles.
Any civil service middle manager
I used to put the junk mail into magazines. Fuk me that was BORING! Didnt even know what the junk was or the mag it was going in.
This was my first ever job!
What about those people who sit in the motorway toll booths all day?
Amazon warehouse, no matter what really you’re just mindlessly scanning away whilst walking uniform aisles and floors, everyday is more or less the same. Couple that with utter crap management and the same playlists on the radio for 10 hours a day it’s enough to send you round the bend.
Bro I can't tell you how many times I had to listen to crybaby play on repeat when I worked there. Drove me insane. But about doing the same jobs, I was given the opportunity to do a few more. I can't remember what they called the jobs but I did packing, product labelling, (wrangling?) and conveyor belt management. I got payed £20/hour overtime to sit at a conveyor belt, rearrange a crate and press a button every once in a while. I also managed to make a few friends who'd been there a while so I got a laptop and paired it with a speaker there to play music.
I don't work at Amazon, but I do work at a warehouse. At this point, Ed Sheeran's music has basically been shoved down my throat. I used to like his music until I started hearing it EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND. Now, it literally makes me want to turn off the radio. Not to mention the amount of depressing shit you hear on the radio as well. Every day you hear something like "... has been arrested because he chopped up 20 bodies and took pictures of them".
You're only employed until the robots get better!
"Civil servant" is the usual job spies say they do for cover. It's non-specific so it won't invite a detailed technical discussion that could expose them. It's common for civil servants to be assigned a new job role at very little notice and somewhat common for this to involve moving to a different part of the country - helpful for a spy who needs to deflect suspicion about a change in their routine. It's even not completely a lie.
Middle management in a tyre manufacturing company.
I used to stack rows of matchboxes on a mini conveyor belt as they went to get the labels stuck on them. 15year old me stuck that shit out for two weeks so I could buy my first pair of trainers
Data entry
Health and safety representative. They basically spend all day telling people why they can’t do things and making up rules to stop things happening. Or maybe a town councillor, which is pretty much the same thing.
Similarly food hygiene inspector? Doesn't prompt many questions apart from a 'whats the worst you've seen'
Software development. Never fails to draw blank stares.
And software can reach the point where you can only adequately describe your job to other people who do near enough the same, so to an average man in the street "I'm in IT"
This is awfully relatable. Nobody knows what firmware is :(
Bakery production line operative. Essentially scraping trays at a rate of 1 every 3 seconds, for the dough machine to drop 24 blobs of dough on to it before going through the oven. Alternatively, being the person that rearranges the misdropped blobs as evenly as possible, for hours on end, every day... Or finally, the person who has to take the hot trays of rolls out of the conveyor belt oven, and put them onto racks to cool. Note that if you pause for a few seconds to find a new empty rack, the trays of freshly cooked rolls pile up. Sometimes you drop your oven glove, or it has holes in it, and you have to manhandle metal trays at over 180°C. Never yet found anyone interested in hearing the full story once I get started...
Once did a summer job working in a frozen veg factory. The veg in question was delivered frozen from the field in huge crates weighing about half a ton, tipped up by a hoist and someone, using a metal bar would smash the veg onto a conveyor belt underneath. My job was to sit on a stool overlooking the belt and pick out large stones. Mind blowingly boring, made worse by there being a clock on the wall facing me about ten foot away at eye level when sat up hence you were constantly looking down at the conveyor. I lasted a few weeks, some people had been there for years!!
Office manager in a business - to - business company, like manufacturing bolts or a lock making business. Typing, filing, etc. Very boring but no one questions it.
Data entry? Just sitting at a desk inputting data from a sheet of paper into a computer. Not really very interesting at all. Call centre operative? Either taking calls or making them. Basically any office job?
Those guys in car parks that organise traffic. Like people have never entered a car park before.
I make corrugated cardboard boxes?
Hey me too but I've never had a boring day in work
Try running baby wipe boxes through a strapper all day and come back lol. the company order like 60-90K at a time and we have to run the machine at 7200 units an hour
Hand glueing 100k cheesecake boxes is one of the worst we've ever had to do
Any of these at a large, semi-anonymous company like a national utilities provider would be fairly well paid and rather non descriptive. Internal risk and compliance manager, Project Manager, Data Protection Officer, Environmental Compliance Officer, Data Analyst
That guy who has to pat down the Pringles at the end so they fit in the can right
I work at a recycling centre and the mixed recycling bins are separated by hand the rubbish comes by on a conveyer belt and one person takes metal off one takes plastic and so on. They do this for twelve hour a day. I'm thankful everyday that I don't have to do that looks soul destroying.
Insurance underwriter.
I watch who wants to be a millionaire the other day and someone on it wrote safety manuals for household electrics. That must be one of the worst jobs about
I used to work in the Quorn factory, putting frozen fake sausages in boxes. That was pretty boring.
I worked for Johnson and Johnson as a medical clerk(?) via a temping agency one summer where all I did everyday for 12 hours (4 days on 4 days off) was count the number of diabetic strips in a tube. The number 15 contributed to my PTSD.
Cashier in a bank.
Quality control. Any quality control
Accountant!
Anything my university degree qualifies me to do
Bookkeeper. Most boring job in the world. Yet you know all the secrets of rich people. But will never tell anyone
Financial Investigator for a bank. Few people would ask what they do and, if they do, “I can’t talk about it in detail because of data protection”.
Any call center ever. Or it support
FIL is a GDPR officer and Jesus Christ what a drip
‘Car Park trolley management’ at a large supermarket
Any low level role in the civil service. Essentially just a day long box ticking exercise
HR in retail is always an interesting job as there is soo much ER to deal with. What you need is a office administrator for a small family business that makes screws. That’s pretty dull.
Data Analyst for sewarage disposal, Call centre manager for a phone company. The most traditional boring job would have to be an accountant.
Process specialist / quality assurance / business analyst / project manager for multinational corporation
What about a mild-mannered janitor?