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On April 20 2016 20:32 Oshuy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this To be honest, most people do get bored at work. Even if you have some goal in sight, you can get bored of writing the same chapter over and over, crossreading can be tedious, ... The goal is what drives you to work despite the boredom, but the difficult part is that an intellectual task forces you to concentrate on what is actually boring to you. On a repetitive manual task, you have an advantage: at some point serving is just what your body does and you have free time to let your mind wander wherever you like. If you are free to think about anything, try to select another topic than how boring the task at hand is.
Was about to write a very similar post, but you did it better, thanks! 
Most things get boring when you do them enough, and being forced to do them (as you are paid to) makes it even more boring.
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On April 20 2016 20:23 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this And that is, presumably, one of the reasons driving you to get a PhD, rather than serving ice cream. Having also worked summer (and weekend) jobs ranging from factory production lines to selling sandwiches, I can say that selling ice cream probably isn't that bad. I quite enjoyed the sandwich job. The sociability of it was quite fun. The days when I had to man the shitty little cart in the non-busy part of the station were the worst. Even that was better than production lines. Judging by my colleagues, they were pretty much all there for the same reason: it was a decent paying job. Nobody, also not the full time employees, were passionate about their work, but it did put food on the table (or in my case, pay for my hobbies).
Yeah, serving ice-cream (or any other job where you have a relationship with human beings) looks to me like it's not that bad, because you can find of sense of fullfilment in the service you give to people, and you can see the effects of this service immediatly. Unlike, say, factory working.
On April 20 2016 20:30 SoSexy wrote:
To me, most of those jobs are just done because people need money. When I want to test people to know if they have fulfilling jobs, I ask them 'would you still do it/think about it if you won 40 million euro?'. I have yet to meet someone who says 'flipping burgers at mc donald is my dream job, god damn it I love it!'. It's always stuff like 'it's not that good, but I need money..' 'it could have been worse', 'this is temporary' :/ I really have a mental problem relating to these issues
Well yeah, most people work because they have to work, that's the basis of our societies.
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On April 20 2016 20:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 19:45 Cascade wrote:
I'm a bit of a facebook n00b:
A friend commented on one of these posts with 50k comments, I got the notification, but there is no way I can find the comment, as it was a few hours ago, and I don't feel like scrolling through 50k comments for it. Is there a way to find the link to the comment, or is it lost forever in the mists of the FB database? I'm at most moderately interested in the comment, but I'd be a bit surprised if there is no way for me to find the comment. Usually, it's the first or last comment visible in the subset of comments shown to you when you click the notification at the time you were notified. Unfortunately, if it's getting non-stop comments, then your friend's comment will surely no longer be first or last anymore, and may get swallowed and lost. The comments are almost always in chronological order though, so if you saw that he posted the comment at 10:30 PM last night, you can keep opening up/ scanning through the list of comments until you find the comments posted around that time. His comment should be there.
Thanks. I was thinking of the time-scroll as well, but I can't find a time stamp... It only says "X commented on this" :/
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On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this
My job is pretty repetitive.
6:30-??? resolving errors from the previous day
??? to 3:15- Dealing with issues people find in the system/trouble shooting.
There is something kind of zen about it, and you can find small amounts of fun/diversion in finding small improvements and working from there. The end of my day, or if I want to work on it during the morning I can it is just generally how we work as a team, can be super varied and is basically project time.
I find a good deal of comfort in routine as well though that isn't for everyone.
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On April 20 2016 20:30 SoSexy wrote:
To me, most of those jobs are just done because people need money. When I want to test people to know if they have fulfilling jobs, I ask them 'would you still do it/think about it if you won 40 million euro?'. I have yet to meet someone who says 'flipping burgers at mc donald is my dream job, god damn it I love it!'. It's always stuff like 'it's not that good, but I need money..' 'it could have been worse', 'this is temporary' :/ I really have a mental problem relating to these issues
Most people are not doing something they would do if they had a choice.
Some people are.
Teaching is kind of a neat profession to see both sides of this; people who really embody the "if you can't do" are side-by-side with the people who took the lower cash/status just because they really give a shit. What makes it interesting is how easy to tell which kind of teacher each one is due to the general lack of accountability in teaching jobs... in high paying/status/risk jobs like banking etc. it's hard to tell who's dedicated and who's mercenary since both act in fundamentally similar ways.
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United States44439 Posts
On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this
You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving.
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On April 20 2016 23:55 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving.
Your mind is switched off when driving?
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On April 20 2016 23:55 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving.
or parenting.
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On April 20 2016 23:55 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving.
Like performing surgery.
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On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this
Because that's not what it is?
Your job is what you make it, and it will have parts of it that are repetitive and parts of it that aren't. It really depends how proactive you are.
Do you make the ice cream?
Do you market the ice cream?
How do you communicate to others about the ice cream?
How do you make the customer's experience with *your* ice cream unique?
Are you chatting with customers?
Are you making it a performance piece?
Is there an art to how you scoop it, how you hand it over, or how you talk about it?
The only reason you ever get bored with a job is because you yourself are making it boring.
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On April 21 2016 00:28 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this Because that's not what it is? Your job is what you make it, and it will have parts of it that are repetitive and parts of it that aren't. It really depends how proactive you are. Do you make the ice cream? Do you market the ice cream? How do you communicate to others about the ice cream? How do you make the customer's experience with *your* ice cream unique? Are you chatting with customers? Are you making it a performance piece? Is there an art to how you scoop it, how you hand it over, or how you talk about it? The only reason you ever get bored with a job is because you yourself are making it boring.
Yeah. .. no. While working fast enough to get your part of a production line done in time, and neatly without mistakes may be a little bit challenging, there is nothing that makes it not-boring for hours on end. Allowing your mind to wonder helps, as does music, bit it is fundamentally tedious work.
That said, I now do work that entices me and I am inherently motivated to do, and do well, but even so there are boring parts. Running the same experiment and ana lysis over and over with different parameters does also get tedious. However unlike factory work, that is just one task out of many different ones that I have to do.
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As an air traffic controller I have to agree. Staring at a monitor with blinking dots for hours on end wears me out. You have to make it interesting for yourself to get you through the day, like trying to get 2 dots to touch and combine to make a bigger dot, or watching netflix instead.
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On April 21 2016 03:02 Epishade wrote:
As an air traffic controller I have to agree. Staring at a monitor with blinking dots for hours on end wears me out. You have to make it interesting for yourself to get you through the day, like trying to get 2 dots to touch and combine to make a bigger dot, or watching netflix instead.
Ronald Reagan wants a word with you.
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On April 20 2016 23:55 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving.
Depending on where you work this is bad for your future prospects. If your employer supports upwards mobility from the lowest position then being active at work improves your chances of that. If there is no option for that I can agree with shutting down. Either way it will happen now and then on tedious tasks, most humans aren't great at things like that.
Seen a lot of people that comes to work, do their hours and then leave (with their brain turned off at the entrance). The most demotivating people to work with that you can't do anything about are them, advantage being that you know exactly what you will get.
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On April 21 2016 03:02 Epishade wrote:
As an air traffic controller I have to agree. Staring at a monitor with blinking dots for hours on end wears me out. You have to make it interesting for yourself to get you through the day, like trying to get 2 dots to touch and combine to make a bigger dot, or watching netflix instead.
Wait--two dots touch is bad isn't it?
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Depends if they disappear or not.
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United States44439 Posts
On April 20 2016 23:59 OtherWorld wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 23:55 KwarK wrote:On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving. Your mind is switched off when driving?
Sure. You really remember all the decisions you make when you drive? Every mirror check? Every lane change?
I don't. I know how to drive and my body pretty much autopilots it without me thinking about it. Maneuvers are performed from start to finish out of muscle memory.
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On April 21 2016 05:09 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 20 2016 23:59 OtherWorld wrote:On April 20 2016 23:55 KwarK wrote:On April 20 2016 20:05 SoSexy wrote:
How the fuck do people not get bored doing the same job over and over?
I can't understand jobs without a sense of progress. If you write a book, you have some sort of goal. Serving ice-cream, on the other hand, is just a repetitive task. How do you not get bored to death after 3 months doing it? To me it feels like the equivalent of opening and closing a door. After 5 minutes it feels like an eternity but you still have 7 hours 55 to go. I will never understand this You switch off and your mind wanders. It's like driving. Your mind is switched off when driving? Sure. You really remember all the decisions you make when you drive? Every mirror check? Every lane change? I don't. I know how to drive and my body pretty much autopilots it without me thinking about it. Maneuvers are performed from start to finish out of muscle memory.
Hmm OK, I wasn't thinking of muscle memory but of conscious stuff like keeping your safety distance with the car in front of you or other stuff you need to constantly monitor (like your speed relative to the speed limit if you don't have overdrive)
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EPT
