Most tedious thing you've ever done...

Man, that sounds like hell. I would (hopefully) think that when people say they'd love being paid to do nothing, it would involve being able to actually do other stuff as well. Internet, books, handheld stuff, etc.

Otherwise, yeah, that sounds like soul crushing horror, being able to do nothing, or having to resort to those measures.

Getting the 72-hour survival achievement in the first Dead Rising

I'm trying to think if any one project of obsessive organizing on my computer can compare to my most tedious job. I'm either at standing in one spot to sort letters into a box for 6 hours straight every day for a week or when I retitled the artist names and downloaded album art for half my itunes library a few years back.

That is exactly the same thing my brain went to for this question.
You spend so much time just waiting while doing that one, you go into a new area, get all of the food you can find, bring it to a safe place and then just wait and watch your health slowly go down and when you are close to death you eat and then rinse and repeat until you are out of food and find a new area and do it again.
I'm so glad I don't give a shit about achievements anymore.

I guess filling up shelves at the supermarket when I still worked there years ago. Otherwise, my life is pretty fun and exciting. There is some stuff I don't want to do, for sure, but I wouldn't call it tedious either. Just not fun.

Alphabetizing about 100,000 topo maps... It was a long process

Building my list of movies I've seen on Screened by going through all the movies in the wiki from A-Z.

When I was an intern at a hotel a few years ago, they wanted me to scan ALL of their documents from the past 8~ years so they had it in a digital format. After the first few months of 2004, I started to realize how awful this project was going to be. Doing the same thing over and over and over again melts your fucking brain.

@splodge: I lolled

Stuffing envelopes for a full shift.

I did volunteer work at my high school library. Most of the tasks are pretty tedious; Put books where they belong, check out computers and books to students/faculty, clean the bookshelves and tables, etc. But the one that takes the cake as being the worst for me was when we got new books. UGH. Stamping, bar coding, and adding pockets and security stickers might not sound so bad, but when you've got like 50 books to do it on that shit becomes exhausting.

There was another task where I had to sort the passes kids would bring in. Doesn't sound so bad, but we had to keep passes from the first fucking day of school, because of the off chance someone would request that information. The worst part is when you rubberband them together, every few weeks they would fucking explode in the drawer they were in and went all over the place, meaning you'd have to do it again. (I ended up stapling them so they wouldn't do that.) Thankfully my duties there ended and the passes became someone else's responsibility.

Shaving carrots potatoes,ect at my old restaurant job. You do off dozens of those fuckers only to have to do it again days later.

Shopping with women and most System Analysis and Design lectures and assignments have been the most tedious.

Playing any MMOs.

Putting electronics devices through a RF test.

1. Open envelope
2. Pull 2 pieces of paper out of envelope
3. Paperclip them together
4. Repeat for 10 hours

No breaks, no music, no podcasts. My life was envelopes for 10 hours. The paperclips made my fingers silvery and numb.

I had a gig where I had to scan lab notebooks for a R&D department at a medical diagnostics company. A few days a month I got a perch myself at the copier and scan the notebooks a page at a time (they were bound, so I couldn't just feed a stack of papers into the thing), front and back, for about 30 people. Then afterwards I had to skim through each individual notebook scan and make sure everything came over okay. I'm pretty sure nobody used the scans and just referred back to the paper copies if they needed to look something up.

My first job was to wash plastic bins, used to store fresh fish, in a 95 degree humid room.

• Go to the production lines, get a few stacks of empty and dirty bins
• Go into the room and wash them.
• Take clean bins back outside, get new stacks.
• Repeat for 8 hours every day.

But hey, I lost a looooot of weight during that year.

Life: Sitting on a phone in a market research job while the auto-dialler called nothing but non-existent and disconnected numbers for about 3 hours.

Games: Airing out piles of books for days in Shenmue 2 (I still love you Shenmue 2).

Hmmm, what context do you mean? In a video game or in my day to day life willingly or at work, less willingly? I'll just answer each.
VG: I collected every feather in AC2. I was excited that I found a cool map on achievement hunter with built in video links for the hard ones.
Life: I play Magic the Gathering. I like sorting my cards by rarity, card type, mana cost, and finally alphabetically. I can be pretty dull.
Work: All of them? I've been a Janitor, Warehouse Worker, Medical Records Archiver, Receptionist, Gas Station Cashier, etc. Probably sitting in archives filing medical forms for 8ish hours a day.
The archives thing probably takes the taco.

You spend 2 hours playing Bravely Default.

You are in a bad mood.

Although I'm certain I've done more tedious things, I don't think I find anything more tedious than being unemployed and applying for jobs. I don't usually mind if a job is tedious, I'll do whatever. But god almighty do I hate the process of applying for a new job. I'm getting close to that point now, and I'm dreading it.

@white_sox said:

Oh this is me, I got the idea of adding in....composer for each and every song on my 20,000 music collection. I wanted to make sure it was always in order (example: singer, guitarist, base, drummer, etc) for each and every song. Took 2 months and I regret it. I eventually got over this compulsive desire to be really organised and I removed all the composers for every song to make my life easier. Best decision in a long time.

watitng for the bombcast

Yeh that really sucks.

Entering grades in a gradebook that has an interface that looks like it was made my a drunken orangutan. Shit is so damn boring.

4th year design project for chemical engineering course...had to design an ethanol plant, reactors, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, etc. Spent sleepless nights for the entirety of the course...only to get a passing grade for that project. That sucked real bad.

I worked in a C&C factory cutting plexiglass for eight hours a day for three entire summers. On the fourth summer I got to build kevlar vests.

Not as cool as you probably think it is.

@oldirtybearon: did they make you sweat?

I spent several hours rerolling skills on Helel in P4 trying to get the right combination of null/absorb/repel passives so he'd only take Almighty damage. The worst part about that was that I couldn't just hit X and circle over and over, I had to actually pay attention to the skills he got on each roll to make sure I didn't accidentally skip over the setup I wanted. I think I eventually gave up and made an invincible Metatron instead, which was way easier.

Besides that, shiny breeding in Pokemon, hunting beetles for cash in New Leaf, and the majority of FF13 were all pretty brutal.

For some reason I keep most of all my notebooks from college classes, even some from high school. One day I decided to rewrite all of the notes I took so that instead of having the physical notebook "taking up space" (they weren't even really taking up space), I could just have a digital copy. This is really pointless considering I'm done with school and have no use for these notes/never cared about the class in the first place. But I can't stop myself from doing it.

I also tried properly tagging/sorting my over 10,000 images on my computer. I gave up on that after a couple thousand, especially when I realized I had done a large chunk of them wrong.

@sinusoidal: I'm one of those weirdoes that actually enjoys tree planting. I mean yeah, its fucking backbreaking labour, but at least you get to be outside all day and exercising.

Its fat camp where I can be stoned and make a bunch of money.

testing, cleaning, and matching dongles to used guitar hero/rockband peripherals for each system available. so many stickers..........

FYI- to get stickers off of stuff, use a hair dryer to melt the glue first.

I'm also OK with being outside and exercising all day, but did I mention I made $125 my first week of getting up at 4am and going home at 6pm because they charged us for gear and the van that took us to the site and we were paid by the crew and most of my crew sucked? I did it on the east coast where it's nowhere near as lucrative or indeed not-corrupt-as-shit as the west coast.

@ripelivejam: why is every answer not this?! Why wasn't my answer this??!! I am officially changing my answer to this.

@slaps2: ...you know there are flashcard apps that contain entire dictionaries already, right? I use one just called "Japanese" for iOS and you can test yourself on every word without having to go through that.

When I was an apprentice in a workshop I had to punch holes with a hydraulic metal worker in metal plates for 10 hour days for three weeks straight. I mean there was a lot of that sort of thing alternating, but in this case it was the single task and nothing else.

I've definitely done more tedious stuff than that since I think, but that really stood out at the time.

Last year working at the mines I worked 12 hour shifts alternating days and nights during summer temperatures between 40 and 55 celsius for 5 months with two days off. Was getting pretty wound up by the end of that.

Not technically the most tedious but I did beat Bloodrayne Betrayal.

Putting together 3 desks in a row...I think I said more f-bombs during those hours then I'd like to have.

I moved medical files from one warehouse to another. They had to be packed into metal crates, loaded into a van, then unloaded in order in the new warehouse.

The best part was that they were sorted by year in the original warehouse, and they wanted them sorted by name in the second. So unloading them onto shelves was a huge guess.

***oxymoron alert!***

I clicked on that games journalism thread the other day...

Explaining to people what all the different parts of a computer do at Future Shop. It's all knowledge they don't give a fuck about and will forget once they leave the store but they think that being inquisitive and wasting my time makes them seem smarter.

I restocked shelves at a supermarket for a year..... at least I could listen to podcasts and music doe

I think filling sand bags is the "winner" though moving everything from one place to another only to have to move it back is a close second.

Scrubbing years of built up crap from a maple hardwood floor. I had to do it by hand because no chemicals or mops were cutting it. Inch by bloody inch.

Not saying this just to try and sound cool but testing load times is pretty rough. QA is not playing games for a living.

A three month on / off row with my better half was tedious.