Back as a teenager working as a stock boy in a grocery store: had to spend tedious hours pulling items up to the front of the shelf. We called it "blocking" or "facing". Tagging and placing items was actually fun and meaningful because you'd see empty shelves get full and people could buy shit. But blocking was pointless, as customers would constantly buy shit and the shelves would need to get redone. Blocking was legit busy work.

To this day, if I grab something from a perfectly aligned shelf, I'll block it because I know how boring it is for the dude doing it.

Present day: My bosses need me to design a series of spreadsheets that take tens of hours to produce and are looked at by no one. And inevitably each year, the format needs to be changed because PMC dude with no tech ability has some clever idea about what needs to be done. So instead of reusing what I've done, I've got to spend more pointless hours redoing it. This year I need to add two new columns for like 50 records, and make graphs.

*you can totally make fun of me for being a white collar nerd... I deserve it

  • Mog_Pharou [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Every lab tech is required to stare into a microscope and report gram stains for bacterial culture lab tests. The quantities and type of bacteria go out to the tech that reads the culture plates. I'm the tech that reads the culture plates; we don't even look at the gram stain counts, all that cumulative effort is a total waste, and we are talking hundreds and hundreds of slides via an entire department of people. You would think a medical/science profession would be different from a retail setting, but nope, we are faking it here too.

      • Mog_Pharou [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Not quite, the stains are just useless information. The techs reading the actual culture don't use the gram stain in any way, we use what's actually growing on the agar plates. It's just extraeneous, and an entire automated staining machine and hundreds of hours of labor from nearly every person in the department goes into reading the smears to assist a person who doesn't use the information at all.