File this!
One summer my Dad lined me up with an office job at another office of his company.

The task was described as "an IT digitisation project". Sounded interesting.

It was a 40 minute driver, the cost of which I would never recoup. One day one I was led into a very very dull office that was in fact an old prefab junior school. Long since the council had decided not even kids would put up with the place and so it was put to other use.

I was sat at a pokey little desc actually IN the corridor entrance to the office. I faced a plain white wall/alchove. There were no decorations/distractions or anything of mental appeal. The work was systematically getting a file from the filing cabinet and 1 page at a time feeding it into a sheet fed scanner then "filing" it electronically by labelling the file and logging it into their "new" system.

It had a monochrome screen, a DOS interface and I'm sure the school I had attended binned junk like this 10 years previously! (This was 1998 for christs sake!).

Lunch was spent being ignored by the suicidally introverted and withdrawn other staff and essentially aside from a 10 minute introduction to the work and "goodbye" at 5pm I didn't talk to anyone for the whole 2 days I was there.... until in the afternoon I could take it no longer. I walked up to the lady somehow appointed with the job of "managing" me and said:

"I'm sorry. I won't be coming back tomorrow. I've been offered a temporary job shelf filling at Tesco and I think it would be a step up for me, certainly a more interesting challenge."

She looked shocked. How could he not be interested in this work? You like computers don't you? To this day I honestly believe if I'd done that job for say a year I'd have become a statistic or a news story depending on whether I found the trainline or a rifle first. Needless to say it was better for everyone that I left.

I did make sure that I amused myself by filing the "mong"/special needs kids with an array of funny names or medical conditions.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Thu 22 May 2008, 17:45, Reply)