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

  • GenXen [any, any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I have a similar story, and many hours facing store shelves to move up to a job that pays multitudes more but arguably even more useless.

    With that work history, what I cannot stand now are the plethora of boomers in my FB feed with the memes:

    "I refuse to use the self-checkout stand at the grocery store. I am not paying you to do YOUR JOB!"

    It's not even a worker solidarity thing, they don't care about automation taking jobs. They just feel entitled to have their stuff scanned and bagged for them while paying next to nothing for a cart full of produce that was pretty much stolen from the country of it's origin.

    One person on my feed bitched because a cashier pointed out the self-checkout stand to her. I tried to point out that I'd suspect that the cashier is being told to recommend the self-checkout by her manager and monitoring how often she recommends it to customers. I was greeted by a chorus of boos advising me that I was wrong, and that the cashier was just a removed. If I still worked in a grocery store I would gladly face products all day rather than have to socially interact with those people at a cash register (many of whom I'm related to).