Ms. Entity reminded me
of my last job that I held as an engineer.

The company I worked for made equipment for treating drinking water and for dealing with wastewater. The equipment I dealt with mostly was essentially a self-cleaning grate that filtered the big chunks out of the sewage- rocks, tree branches, bodies, that sort of thing. It dragged a rake up and dumped it into a hopper which was then emptied once a day by the plant staff.

So a sales engineer (not me) would go out to the site to visit the client and take measurements and discuss options (stainless steel vs painted steel, explosion-proof motor vs regular). He would enter all of this into an Excel sheet to give a quote to the client, and once it was approved he would turn it over to the drafting department.

The designer (not an engineer, but a CAD person) would bring up a standard drawing, input a bunch of variables, then produce drawings of the machine. In the upper right corner SolidWorks would produce a Bill of Materials which included everything down to the bolts needed.

My job? I was given the drawings and had to copy out the Bill of Materials into an Excel sheet for Purchasing. But not the entire bill, mind you- only parts of it. Then I clicked on a button onscreen that submitted it to Purchasing.

And that was it. For that I got $33/hour.

Never been so bored in my entire life.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sun 26 Feb 2012, 23:55, 4 replies)

I had a temp job once which comprised taking staples out of cheques attached to letters and replacing them with paperclips. It was only for two weeks, felt like years.
(Freakmandu, Mon 27 Feb 2012, 0:11, closed)

I lasted 14 months.
I tried learning SolidWorks while I was there to help alleviate the tedium, only to be told by the head of the CAD department that this was not allowed as I was an engineer, not a designer.

I had very mixed feelings about being laid off- on the one hand it was the spring of 2009 and a bad time to be jobless, but on the other hand I didn't have to spend another stultifying day as an Excel monkey.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 27 Feb 2012, 0:19, closed)

Data entry lols
I once - admittedly many years ago - saw a tv program showing how amazing modern computer techniques were. It was at the Ordnance Survey, producing maps.

One computer would produce a schematic map, which was then printed out on a large plotter. An operator would then go over this paper printout with a mouse-like crosshair, clicking the data points back into a different computer...

I think the sound of facepalming shifted the earth's orbit slightly.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Mon 27 Feb 2012, 11:16, closed)

Data entry is fine
if you don't have an engineering degree. Seriously, they could have paid someone a third of what I made and had it done just as easily!

The real reason they had me doing this? Purchasing was very set in their ways with how things got submitted. They could have automatically exported the BOM to Excel and had it go through, but then Purchasing would have to sort through and strike out what wasn't needed.

And yeah, digitizing maps like that is idiotic. Even in the 80s I could transfer from one CAD platform to another.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 27 Feb 2012, 14:02, closed)