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
once had a manager look down the aisle i’d just faced, decide i hadn’t done it well enough, and mess it up just to tell me to do it again.
Fucking gulag, what an ass
Facing shelves is the modern world's equivalent of the myth of Sisyphus, except that shit is by no means mythical.
I've always been down for facing or hauling out cardboard. There's so many chances to waste time.
For restaurant gifs, if the place sucks just leave and find another place. Quitting a job because the kitchen was run piss poor really won't affect your next kitchen job. Everyone who has worked kitchens has gotten a sense for the ones to avoid.
The boss had no idea how to manage labor despite bragging about how they used to manage large crews of people in their previous work. They would hire the absolute worst people and interpersonal problems caused everything to blow up once a week.
I had a boss who was the same way, he was supposedly a former CEO with an MBA who ran mining operations in Russia and Mexico and he would brag about his career and education all the time but he was absolute dogshit at managing people. He wanted to ramp up production so he hired a whole bunch of new people but he didn't vet them at all so they ended up being mostly dysfunctional drug addicts, then he promoted some of those new hires to leadership positions even though they didn't have any previous experience in that type of job. He would also hold weekly meetings where he would scream at us and call us motherfuckers, which pissed everybody off so bad that someone stole his laptop and broke it.
The crazy part is the worst thing water can be is stagnant. People are buying stagnant water when they have flowing water that literally comes right into their home
I worked at clothes retail store that held no niche and was basically redundant. I would pace around the shoe section for hours, being told to "size the shoes", essentially reorganizing the boxes in size order. That wasn't the worst part though.
When you go into a shoe store and see the clearance section without boxes, it typically requires a whole process. You get a bunch of shoes in a box slated for clearance. You remove them from the box, scan the box, print two annoying stickers. One goes on the bottom of one shoe, the other on a tag. You then take two of those single use plastic ties, one ties the shoes together, one holds the paper tag with the price sticker on it. Every time someone tries on a pair, you need to re-do the plastic tie that ties them together.
Now do that for 4 hours straight while listening to the classic sad retail music. The only thing nice about that job was the people, but managment were all dicks who would make you stand far away from anyone else so you had to sit there isolated and alone. AP would snitch on you for using your phone but you could go to the back easy pz. Some people napped on the shelves back there.
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.
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.
Cleaning and reformatting decades of old excel spreadsheets.
I’m sure they’ll never use it but it probably helped keep me employed during COVID which was nice.
I actually liked facing shelves because it was done in the last hour of my shift if I closed and it shut my brain off for that hour lol.
Yeah, facing is definitely pointless. At the same time I would occasionally pretend to be facing to make it look like I was working.
At my new job we have to punch our times twice (two times to clock in, go on lunch and clock out). Its annoying.
The amount of copies and re-writes of case notes for all my clients
I'm just imagining that you're a private detective, and your case notes include suspects and details of the crime scene.
No I teach GED classes through a non-profit that is considered a medical provider
I bet the teaching is fun and motivating (albeit hard). The case notes are likely filed in some unread attachment in grant applications (I'm guessing).
Sorry to ramble. I'm in such a shitty mood now.
Pretty much, yeah. The biggest difficulty with the teaching isn't actually the teaching (which I am enjoy and am good at and is honestly easy) but getting students to show up at all. And the case notes are the worst.
no one needs to stand to sell you things over the counter! couldnt stand the way they made us do that. the only real chairs in my store were in the break room and the boss's office, retail is deranged.
I always feel super bad for checkout people, when they have to ask for or push certain memberships or credit cards. It must become the dead, automatic script after a while... "do you a credit card.... 5% of first purchase".
Working on software that has like 20 competing products all trying to do the same thing. Fuck, just open source everything. Drives me nuts thinking about the amount of human resources that must be wasted on reinventing the wheel in this industry.
But how will the free market Innovate(tm) without having seventeen different companies build their own identical version of an artifact storage tooling and then bloat them with infinite useless features that no one asked for?
Blocking isn't necessarily busywork, it's a form of marketing (people buy stuff that's plentiful and easy to see, also near eye level). But it's definitely an absolute waste of time overall, a squandering of labor potential.
I always looked at the back to pull out products with an earlier expiration date so the food didn’t get thrown out, but that’s a pain in the ass lol.
And nobody's paying you to do it! And it's retail so you gotta put up with so much crap.
I do not miss it lol
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).
