Wow, I wish I’d thought of that.
A French man has been awarded a £36,000 payout after his job was deemed so tedious he suffered from extreme ‘bore-out’.
Back in the early eighties, I was temping and took a two week assignment with a local engineering firm. At the end of the two weeks, I was offered a long term temping role as a technical clerk, so I took it. The post, however, didn’t really exist. It was a classic non-job. There were no duties as such. What little there were could be achieved by the first tea break of the morning. It was created as a part of one man’s empire building. So I spent around two years going out of my skull with boredom while I tried to find something else.
Should have sued…
That’s you, me, and probably around ten million others.
In my experience most office-based jobs above the level of data entry clerk can be done in about two hours a day if you eliminate all the useless meetings and gossiping.
My last job at Network Rail could be done in a few hours at home. For the final six months that was what I did. I would start about six in the morning and get cracking on the computer while my mind was fresh. I’d be finished by late morning and took the rest of the day off. I delivered the work on time and to the required standard, but I wasn’t working full time. But then, no meetings, no gossiping and no three-hour commute in each direction.
Boredom at work is soul destroying. Have suffered a few times
Stand out was as a Consultant on a Gov IT project (GPASS)
Gov insisted we had Project Manager (Principal Consultant), one Senior Consultant and a Consultant on site 8 hrs each 08:00 to 18:00 M-F, min 3 month continuity, to supervise contractors. Mind numbing boredom made worse by having to look busy and cost to taxpayer £x,000 pd
Every time I’ve worked in/with state sector has been same, their expectations of staff could be achieved in 2-3 hours per day. It’s working with sloths
I often think state sector is a job creation scheme for those private sector don’t want
Ya think?
I have never worked for the state but their employees have told me more than once that the people in the next office/department are lazy so-and-so’s whose work could be done in half the time or with half the staff.
I think its become increasingly a matter of society sorting itself by psychological traits voluntarily. Those who have a bit of nous, get up and go and have as much interest in getting things done as financial rewards will ultimately find themselves in the private sector (if they start out in the state sector they will soon become frustrated and leave) and those who just want a salary and couldn’t care less about what they achieve to get it end up in the state sector (similarly if they start in the private sector they will find that not to their liking and gravitate to an ‘easy’ state job)
Its why the state sector is utterly unreformable now, its disproportionately inhabited by people who are psychologically uninterested in it functioning more efficiently. The only way I can see it reformed is if vast swathes of it were abolished, but you continued to pay the staff regardless, to make it politically acceptable. In many cases it would actually be economically better – the staff are net drags on the economy when they are ‘working’, sending them home on full pay would mean no less consumption, less of a brake on private sector activity, and some of them might end up also working in some productive private sector job.
Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the past 3 months ?
Problem for avg good Joe is state pays more than private and they’ll tolerate the boredom for the money & security. Thus depriving private sector of potential good workers
Being an industrial plant fitter certainly wasn’t boring but could be pretty unpleasant. Try crawling inside a combine harvester in hot summer or underneath a digger on a muddy building site in winter. I left that game in the mid 1980s but I was traumatised for life, where’s my compo?
Forty years sailing the Accountant Sea. I should be a billionaire.