Easy Jobs With Nothing to Do

I used to think it'd be great to have a really easy job, where you could just laze around and not do anything, but having had one or two in the past, I now know there's nothing worse.

Time crawls. You get bored out of your mind. Cif and Lilly both have shop jobs which on occasion involve standing around with no customers for lengthy periods of time, doing nothing. Both despise it and would rather be busy.

One particular job I had many years ago was at Ickenham tube station. They were working on the tracks each night and my job was to sit in a portakabin in the yard on my own during the daytime and sign for the deliveries of gravel etc as they arrived and tell them where to tip them.

There were only half a dozen deliveries a week. Sometimes you went two days without a delivery.

At first it was great, but after a few days of solitary portakabin confinement I was starting to go a bit stir crazy. The boredom was too much. There was a little row of shops about 5 mins away and after hours of sitting on my arse doing nothing, I'd eventually crack and think I'd run over there to the newsagents and get a Morning Star and a Kit Kat and run back.

I'd get back and there would always, always be a note stuck to the gates:-

"We tried to deliver gravel but had to go away again...."

I think I lasted about a week and a half before resigning in embarrassment at three missed deliveries before they sacked me.

 

Did they order the Morning Star specially for you?

Pre privatisation by the sound of it.

 

I'm an FD. I have nothing to do as the team do all the work and I just interrupt my time on this Forum by asking them every 30 mins or so if they've "done it" yet. When they say "yes" I just ask them to do something else.

 

As a project manager who has had a few different jobs at different companies/organisations, you can get yourself in a job where you do feck all. Normally this is in the public sector. When you project manage in the private sector, it's often a different kettle of fish. Much busier, more responsibility and a greater fall if it all goes wrong.

When I worked for a public funded body (I'll give you a clue: war graves), I often spent 2 or 3 weeks doing absolutely nothing and then one week of being reasonably busy sorting things out for others to do. The trouble with there was, the people who you needed to do things, never did anything (because they couldn't be arsed, or didn't know how). So in the end it was a hopeless spiral of doing nothing which was a total waste of public money. So I left for pastures new. In another thread some time ago, I alluded to a parting email I sent which caused a bit of trouble as I thought what was going on there was disgraceful.

 

Anyone who works in "strategy" is robbing a living, especially in the public sector.

All they seem to do is generate hot air and occasionally produce documents that are totally vague and pointless - "well, we could maybe do this thing one day, equally we could not do it at all".

 

Fortunately my job is relatively easy, but with plenty to do - nothing too challenging but enough to make the days not drag. Always think about finding something else but the luxury of living so close to work and being home by 5.15 pm with a beer in the garden wins every time.

 

Being in a European support role I find I never know what I'm going to walk into day to day which I love. Personally it isn't the quiet periods that would do my head in but the repetitive tasks.

 

I've always hated having nothing to do, but since social media came along there's always the opportunity to start a fight with somebody on here

 

Actually the bestest evurrr day at work for me was at the end of a major industrial project. After making sure that all data/electronic information was "saved" as I was then personally tasked with making sure that all of the "hard" copies (reports and discs) were destroyed - a not in the least bit boring day was spent feeding reports and data DVDs into the mother of all shredders...

 

If sitting around doing nothing is a description of a good job, then the best job I had was as a copper when I was on a witness protection program in the murder spoken about here.

http://www.barkinganddagenhampost.c...-barking-s-valentine-s-day-killings-1-3676628

I was in a 3 man team protecting Brian Wilson and the restaurant owner, alternately, who both apparently witnessed aspects of the murder. Three months of sitting in the restaurant facing the door, initially unarmed, sleeping in their houses, but occasionally going golfing with them, horse and greyhounds racing, concerts, etc. But mostly, probably 90%, just plain sitting around (free meals though). One of the suspects was related to Brian Reader who masterminded the Hatton Garden heist - their family was right dodgy all round and they used to come in intimidating me on a regular basis. Heavens knows what I would have done if they actually tried to do something. They told me that my training would kick in....!

Before that I was on the team protecting Francis Pym for a while too, not the main personal protection man but part of the wider protection team. Christ he was boring, if ever I wanted a Tory Minister to get sacked so I could move on, it was him. Maggie obliged, thankfully.

 

Your 7583 messages are a silent tribute to your team.

 

I didn't realise that any of the Beach Boys were East End wide boys, but you learn something every day

 

I'm only 24 but every job in my career to date i've had nothing to do. I'm now in a job where I have too much, and it's so much better.

If anyone ever wants an easy life, go and work at a university. The most painful, but easy year of my life.

 

You should run a game of werewolf if you're bored!

I had a boring job a couple of years ago. Every day dragged like it would never end. Wished my life away just to get to the end of the week. Especially bad if you sit in a place where your screen is highly visible and you can't really use your phone too much. Boss was an idiot who didn't really know what he was doing and I was trying to generate my own work as much as I possibly could. I eventually started making up work for myself to do just to keep busy.

 

That’s utter ********. I’ve worked in universities for 25 years, regularly work 50 hour weeks including weekends, and rarely take more than 2.5 weeks of holiday a year. Everyone I know in the sector is much the same and there are some serious mental and physical health issues emerging as a consequence (fortunately, no one that I know, though someone from my last university committed suicide earlier this year seemingly because of work pressures).

 

I'm amazed that Baron Frannie Pym (Eton, Cambridge, Captain in the Lancers) had his own bodyguard, never mind a whole personal protection team. It's not like he was ever a really big shot in the government, was it. He got sacked for being a so-called 'wet' who didn't take sufficient pleasure in smashing the oiks, pretty quickly didn't he?

Who'd want to get at him? Was it because of Northern Ireland, or was it to protect him from the outraged anti-Thatcher public?

 

Bingo!

 

Yes, it was the IRA, and he was Foreign Minister at the time.

 

Did you speak to him much, or didn't he converse with the servants?

If you did, how did he come across? Did he seem like a really clever and talented man who was deserving of the very highest public office, or like an upper-class Eton know-nothing twit?

 

Your 7583 messages are a silent tribute to your team.

Really clever & talented Etonian?

 

How many of the 50 hours are invested on here?

 

I used to talk to him occasionally. I specifically remember him saying once that the worst thing about getting the sack , would be that he'd have to start using British Rail again. Everyone sits about doing nothing apparently.

 

This Pym fellow sounds like a Grade 1 stirrer.

Get him on the forum!

 

I envy you folks with easy jobs. I'm a minion in finance, every bloody 30 minutes, the FD asks me if i've done the impossible task which takes 3 hours, and purely in fear I say yes. Then he gives another 3 hour job. I end up staying in the office after hours, and only frequent this forum once the FD leaves on time. He's a little strange, and a man of few words. He always says "done it" with 2 fingers mimicking speech marks, then mumbles another task which he hasn't really put much thought into. He then slowly walks back to his desk, sits down and types in his password and mumbles "Ha, must be one of moogs" - God knows what that's about. He once left his PC unlocked, and I ran in to quickly drop the stat accounts on his desk and caught a glimpse of his screen. He had googled a variety of cheeses, and had a little note book with pages of different cheese names written down - some of them had been crossed out, almost like a game of word association and someone had used the word "Cheddar" before his turn came. Strange chap, not entirely sure what he does.

 

Had he jotted down M-A-D-E, E-D-A-M?

 

Cheese! He must be Moog. Or IBB

 

You end up with by far the highest post count on a forum, the subject matter of which is only mildly of interest to you.

 

TBF @Keighley are you an academic or do you work for the university. I'm absolutely gobsmacked by what the "staff" do/have done at any of the "fine" institutions I('ve) work(ed) in. What exactly the universities admin depts do (HR I'm looking at you) still mystifies me and that's before I look up to the upper echelons of the food chains at dept heads, VC's and PVC's. I know why they do (kerching) I just don't know what they actually do.

 

I’m an academic.

I entirely agree with you about university admin.

 

Sorry I should have clarified. I'm sure you @keighly have a very different job from what I did. I worked in marketing within a department. Nobody in the entire department did more than 10 hours actual work a week I reckon.

 

Then I am sure you are right.

It’s a bone of some considerable contention to us academics how little work is done by “admin” people compared to what we are asked to do. And we still have to do admin tasks anyway (for example, I am in charge of Masters admissions to my department).

 

After the finiancial crisiss I got made redundant from a Bank, during the consultancy process I had to turn up to work but wasn’t allowed to do anything. Looking back it was naive of me to have actually turned up, most people wouldn’t just called in sick and they wouldn’t have cared but I still turned up every day, for about a month. Inlitterally sat in my office every day and played Tetris on my computer.

The experience led me to ask the question of friends, how much would your salary have to be to sit in an office staring at a wall for 8 hours a day doing nothing?

 

On an unrelated work theme, I have just noticed something which is potentially disastrous.

An agency I work with in the US has created a new role, Sales VP.

That's fine.

The problem is that the chap they've appointed is called Robert Slicker.

More formally, R Slicker.