Sharing is caring. With that in mind, what have been some soul-crushing tasks you had to do in the past?
Personally, I probably had the most trouble, when I was helping someone by instructing over the phone how to delete an old and install a new antivirus. Getting through that 5-step procedure took hours.
At work we use Symantec Management Suite. I had/have to audit roughly 20,000 software components, discovered by software inventory, and make sense of them. That’s a lot of mouse clicks for little reward. If only the interface were faster…
Updating 60+ Drupal installations… I have to do this regularly.
When I was 18 my college put me on an industry placement with a local printing company. My primary role was to sit and watch a daisy wheel printer print out thousands of paying in slips and step in when it jammed or the paper ran out and reset the numbering. I had to do this whilst wearing ear defenders because of the sound of the industrial printing presses just behind me. I’d start at 8am and sit there for five hours until my lunch break at 1pm.
As a secondary task, the managing director of the company asked me to design and implement a material requirements planning and production control management system for his four printing presses, from scratch, in Visual Basic. I was so inexperienced and unconfident I didn’t even realise what a ludicrous request it was and became really stressed about my inability to deliver anything.
One day I just didn’t bother go in again.
Deriving coordinate frame transformations in physics and delta-epsilon proofs in math.
There’s a reason real analysis is called real anal…
Thank God you left the ship! 