Most pointless job you've ever been given

[Listerfiend]

-Clearance ticketed all open-stock scrapbooking paper in preparation for a MASSIVE reset. None of the other cashiers helped out, and it took 4 eight-hour shifts.

-Like the first post, had to clean everything in the front end (including wiping down return bins, shelves, etc.) because that's what the "efficiency experts" wanted us to do because it's make us more "efficient"

-Master worklists. Basically a giant compilation of all of the employee worklists for the day, and each task has to be dated (three sheets' worth every day that had to be done by hand. By the FES for some reason)

-Just today I got this one: my boss has a sheet of notes that has to be transferred to four forms (one for each department manager). I spent most of my shift deciphering his handwriting and wondering why he didn't write his notes on the damn forms himself (and evidently the bookkeeper does this usually, but she wasn't in today so I dealt with it...)

[MrSmiley]

I guess the most pointless job I'd ever had was on the tailend of a 9 month contract. This was a job that had originally been contracted for three months and then just extended further and further. The situation was an insurance company (with a lot of paper work) that was merging with another insurance company. I was in a "mission critical" unit that needed the help.

For 6 of those months it was alright, a regular job with full hours... but as the merging progressed, more and more employees were getting retrained and switched to new systems and shuffling between positions. I had learned skills in various areas to be of use to several different departments and different bosses but my usefulness in those areas was replaced by "the proper people" as time went on. Yet at the same time they wanted to keep me on the payroll and didn't want to lose me on the off-chance that the workload increased suddenly (it had happened before) or duties changed. So during these last months of the job I spent a majority of the time sitting at my desk waiting for work to show up in my assigned areas. When it did, it took 2-15 minutes to handle it and then usually waiting to show up. It got so bad that I started bringing 600 page+ books to work and read through 5 of them (all hardcovers I believe) during the course of my paid hours before corporate finally came to the decision that they didn't need my meager contributions to the workload. Nobody really minded though I had one "wandering boss" who didn't understand it, so another boss told me to hide my reading material inside a file folder while reading it at my desk

[nomorecarts]

Get called up front from the warehouse to go out and get carts when I was working for Big Lots during a lay-off period. I go out and get the two carts in the lot and bring them back. CSM doesn't believe me, and goes out to check.

I've had several somewhat similar jobs

leave a parking lot that is trashed to go get 3-4 carts from the back room of a quarter million square foot store or outside the tire center(many times)

got bitched out about 5 carts once because the asst mgr looked out the door that wasn't open yet and counted 5 carts. there were 70 carts outside the other door, because we had too many courtesy clerks so we all went to get carts from other places and the customers did one of those sneak attacks they do, so we said "oh crap" and had the parking lot clear in about 5 minutes

[Polenicus]

This was from way back when I was in college.

I got a job through the University College of the Cariboo's hire a student program. Basically, to encourage employers to hire us, the government would pay part of our wages. Yay subsidized labor!

Well, this guy who ran a private ESL college (Basically, a school dedicated to helping all the foreign students to immerse themselves in english and adjust to living here) wanted to spiff up his image. He wanted to drum up some new business, and improve his image, so he grabbed me (For marketing), another student to work on the website, and I believe a third to work on his database.

Except... he had no clue what to do with us. Well, me in particular. He wanted me to 'market his college'

Y'see, he had several methods of getting the word out about his college. He had pamphlets, a version to be distributed domestically, and international versions, which were distributed at offices in various asian and european countries.

But, he didn't want me to touch those, because he had them how he liked them.

He also had a website, that he wanted to pop up more frequently in search engines. I did a couple of day's woirth of research into meta tags, and keywords and such before discovering he didn't want me working on that either. The website was how he liked it. He'd also already submitted his site to all the search engines he was interested in, though he didn't bother to tell me that until after I had already resubmitted it to them all.

Well, did he want advertising done? No, he already had that handled. Were there forums online he wanted to post in? Well, no, none of the ones he wanted to hit were in english, so he had local people who spoke the language doing that. Same thing with publications.

So what, exactly, did he want me to do?

Marketing.

That was the answer I got when I asked him, point blank, what he wanted me to do. I didn't have a budget, I wasn't allowed to change anything, and I was given no resources with which to research the industry because he 'already knew everything we needed to know about it anyway, since I've been in the business for years'.

In the end, he fired me in the second week, because I wasn't producing any results.

I wonder why?

[Dreamstalker]

Game store: back in December, (below freezing, windy, snowing, icy and generally miserable outside) clean up around the dumpsters. Not just shovel, but I also had to pick up debris (which respawned a few days later anyway). I was removed from my self-appointed task of making sure the fire exit was unobstructed (i.e. breaking down and tossing the empty mangled boxes and broken-beyond-any-hope fixtures that turned the back hall into an unlit obstacle course).

WHY would you even need me to make the dumpsters look pretty? Yes, they're visible from the parking lot, but they are not outdoor shelving units therefore they don't need to look nice! At least he didn't want me to scrub them down.

I was sorely tempted to corral a few local art students and have them paint the things pretty colors ("you said you wanted them to look nice"), but probably would have been fired for that.

[PepperElf]

Sweeping up water.

(and it's not an uncommon task either)

[SnarkyPie]

On a slow day at work, my coworker and I were sitting at an unused table and talking. I had just finished snarfing down some pizza. I got told by Bossman to clean the glass on the door. This is pointless because nobody uses the wooden doorframe to push it open. Not 5 minutes after I cleaned every last one of those glass panels were there new fingerprints! From our delivery driver, no less.

[DeltaSierra]

Taking every single fishing lure of a LONG back wall display (about 10,000 pieces, easy) and moving them to two inside aisles then re-merchandising the back wall with misc camping goods, took five 10-hour days. Next week after Mr Owner did a walkthrough be informed he wants all the fishing lures back where they were originally. Rinse and repeat. What a waste!!!

[mattm04]

Wash the side walk off, which we do almost daily when it is above freezing, at 8 PM when we are having a crew come in to pressure wash the side walk/facade at 11 PM.

[bigpedaler]

Bigpedaler has two....

2nd most pointless:
1988, U.S. Army, Kreigsfeld, Germany, July 4, a Saturday; called at home, ordered to office to prepare a report for the company commander to present to higher HQ on Monday.
The report: a complete breakdown of all soldiers in the company, by job specialty AND by the actual position they were filling.
Couldn't tell me about it on Friday, couldja?
No computer to do this work, had to be typed up on an old IBM Selectric II. Grabbed the guy I was training to replace me, as I was leaving the unit in six weeks. Neither of us was very happy. As we hand-wrote a rough draft for the report, we made our own "comments" about some of the troops. The notes went in the trash, the report went on the CO's desk.
Monday AM, the notes had reappeared -- in front of some of the people we'd made "comments" about. Caught hell from my First Sergeant -- after he got done laughing at the notes.

Most pointless:
The district manager walked our store a couple months ago, and decided that the extruded black plastic stackbases in our store's aisles were 'grungy', and that the stackbases in front of electronics needed to be armor-all'ed -- NOT by 1 or 2 of the 5 electronics people...by ME, and my co-worker, who were trying to get the bike rack filled.
Stackbases are 4' square, 6" tall, and full of displayed merchandise. WE -- not the people who operated the department -- had to unload, detail, and re-load six of them.
I like spray-and-forget tire shine....We still milked the job for about three hours. Fork 'em.

[Retail Associate]

So what's the most pointless job you've ever been given?

Last week the illegals floor crew came in to strip and wax the floors in our dept.

All our racks/tables are on wheels so we had to move them all out of their normal resting spot into surrounding depts. This was a bit time consuming for those of us moving them out and even moreso for first shift who had to return them to their correct positions in the morning.

I only work weekends and didn't know the floors were being done. So on Saturday our brilliant manager, knowing that the floor crew was coming that night to do kids, who also neglected to tell us 2nd shifters who were required to move the racks/tables out of the way, decided that she wanted all the racks/tables in kids coordinated/folded and lined up perfectly in their proper spots.

She had 2 people working on it during the morning shift and instructed myself and another 2nd shifter to finish what they couldn't and to "Make sure it's still perfect when she comes back in the morning."

Five minutes before the floor crew was to arrive, the night manager comes over and tells us that we had to undo everything that was done that day and push all those perfectly aligned racks and tables out of kids to anywhere we could find room.

The next day it took the morning shift 2 hours to put everything back in it's proper place causing them to not get the stock completely put out and now management is threatening that they will have to work overtime everyday until they get all the stock done.

Yeah...my manager is a moron.

[Arm]

well, I was in the Army, does that count?

I got deployed to Kuwait to support a reserve unit that was constantly complaining that it didn't have enough personnel to support its mission, because they wanted to go *home*. For all I know, the unit is still there. Reservists can only be deployed for two years out of every four, so the unit itself is on permanent half-strength because it's been deployed since the first gulf war. So half their troops are in the US, presumably trying desperately to get reassigned to a different unit for two years, then get sent back to the desert.

Its responsibilities are with reasonable bounds for an understrength unit, though. But, they want to go *home*.

So they complain that they are understrength. So a tasking goes out. Any unit that had available personnel is to send personnel of this, that, or the other specialty to support this reserve unit. At the time, I'd just driven over a major's POV with my Explorer, so I was definitely available.

I spent 11 months in Kuwait (on a six month deployment. Clearly, I was loved at my home duty station.) because this reserve unit kept crying about being understrength, in their bid to convince the powers that be that they couldn't carry out their mission, and should thus be sent home. Don't get me wrong, I don't think a reserve unit *should* be deployed for the better part of two decades, but... yeah.
I built, mostly, a walnut end table in the wood shop. I left it there, pending final assembly, because I didn't have anyplace to work on it when I finally got back to the US. I drew pictures. I washed the car, for no good reason. (They didn't have enough humvees, so they rented american-made SUV's from a local rental place. I can only imagine the cost.) I, being low-ranked and despite my then-current history of vehicular mayhem, drove the car, any time my superiors didn't feel like driving themselves. I surfed the internet, while in the office. I plotted a few million ways of fragging one of my superiors, though I never actually did so. (They ranged from rube-goldberg contraptions to 'I shoot you... in the faaaaaaaaaaace!')

I think that eleven month span is the most pointless thing I've ever done. But, I got paid hazard pay and it was tax free, so, meh. Aside from the whole 'friendless, alone, and going rapidly insane' it wasn't really bad.

[Kheldarson]

I got to sweep out the grate area of the lazy river once. President of the company was coming so those on this particular rotation were told that when we got to the lifejackets portion (stand in front of lazy river, make sure those under 4' have a lifejacket on), we had to take this small broom and dustpan and sweep out all the leaves and stuff that the guests drag in. Then we stopped as soon as the Prez left.

[LibraryLady]

Most useless job I've ever had to do took the better part of a week and went something like this.

We had just instituted an integrated library system and were making sure all old records had been transfered. There were many records that needed to be added. That was done. Now, the silly part begins.

1) All these old cards were kept helter-skelter in a box in a big cardboard box. Arrange them (and we're talking at least 2,000) in alphabetical order.

2) Arrange in phase boxes. We don't have enough phase boxes so we were told to make boxes to fit.

3) Leave out for Boss to decide what to do with them.

4) Boss says toss the lot. PS. We kept the boxes we made so at least we had something to show for that week.

[Difdi]

Most useless job I ever had...

I was working at a recycling company, and the office got new computers. I got told by the office manager to fix all of the old computers to perfect working order. The day after I did so, they were all recycled (as in, woodchipper level of recycling, not merely parted out). The order to recycle them had been signed by the same office manager who had me repairing them, signed the day before he ordered me to do so.