Most tedious thing you've ever done...

So I'm in the process of converting an entire Japanese dictionary into online flashcard form (don't ask why). Noting that I'm on pace to finish in late December, it dawned on me that this is without a doubt the most tedious thing I've ever done. While I'm taking a break, can someone please tell me something more tedious and boring that they've done so that I can feel better?

Sorting out clean from dirty eggs etc. yeah basically all the jobs I´ve ever done/had :/

Bagging groceries. Though I guess in a way it's for-real Tetris.

Hey man, at least you guys are getting paid. All I'll get in return is a few hundred hours of lost time.

Organizing my music collection.

Took me several days.

Shoveling horseshit. Worst summer job ever.

It involves game testing, though I can't say which game.

Most tedious thing I've ever done? Dried cars in the rain. Yeah, think about that for a second and then think about it again. Sometimes helping out friends of the family just isn't worth it.

Going to the gym everyday. All the way until I finally meet my demise and cease to exist. If there's an afterlife weather I'm in hell or heaven. I'll keep working out and getting stronger. I'll be one hell of a powerful demon or angel. It doesn't matter what domain I'll end up in, I'm still going to get a good workout in regardless.

I got pretty deep into some Korean MMOs back in the day. For those of you who don't know, Korean MMOs are notorious for insane grinds. Older versions of these MMOs were fucking brutal. I'm talking 'stay in this one room of this one dungeon killing this one type of enemy for 6 hours and you might be able to squeeze out 10% of the exp needed for your next level' brutal. Maplestory, Sword of the New World, Lineage 2, FlyFF, Rose Online, Silkroad Online, and Perfect World were just a few.

I could have accomplished so much when I was younger.

Every time I wrote flash cards to study with. It always takes three times as long as you expect.

Oh man this is the first time I've seen someone mention Flyff on here. That game was my life for several months and still to this day I kinda still miss it. Met a lot of cool people despite it being a generic Korean grinder.

I can't really think of much else other then playing that game? writing notes for school is pretty tedious I guess.

I once got the brilliant idea of creating a 100x100 landmass floating on top of water in Minecraft. Vanilla Minecraft. I had to hold space while swimming backwards and placing 1000 dirt blocks. I somehow roped my brother and friend into gathering all of the dirt for this.

I might actually have these numbers wrong, but I do know that it was an insane number of blocks to place just for the foundation of something that was going to be built by three people. Once it was finished, you could stand on one edge, turn the view distance all the way up, and not see the other side. And then we started smelting blocks to make a castle on top of it. I think we got a wall all the way around it before we got bored of it. Come to think of it, we probably should have kept working, but it had taken too long to get any sort of progress.

I have since learned my lesson - make small stuff in Minecraft.

Play Final Fantasy XIII! Assassin's Creed 1 too!

I planted trees one summer. Raked blueberries another. Both of those were agonizingly dull, hot and sweaty.

I also wove a hammock once, but I did that by choice not necessity. By the way, don't bother. The amount of rope/twine you need costs more than just buying a bloody hammock.

Could you... explain this further?

Working as a product assembler for a home improvement store. One day could involve building the same product (barbecue, gazebo, picnic table, etc.), and I mean the exact same product not even the same category of product (which was dull enough), for 8-10 hours. One week I built one model of barbecue for five days straight for 8 hours each day. One barbecue took about a half hour to complete. So I ended up building around 80 of the exact same barbecue. It was mind numbing.

In one day? Sorting spent casings by caliber, putting them in sandbags, and carrying said bags to an adjacent compound. These are machine sorted at the factory but a superior insisted it be done this way

When I was in 4th grade, I had a really strict teacher who would not tolerate talking during class. If we got in trouble that day, we would have to copy pages from the dictionary as part of our normal homework. It was usually 10-15 pages you had to copy, and this was before most people had PCs at home so it was all handwritten. It was the worst!! And you know what he did with the copied pages when we turned them in the next day? He threw them in the trash. Right in front of our faces. Son of a bitch didn't even recycle.

During my summer internship we got a job upgrading the computers at some high level cancer research facility. Cue 2 weeks of opening boxes of monitors, putting the monitors together, putting them back in the boxes. Nothing but that for two weeks.

I have done that exact same thing. Twice in fact. The first time involved putting all the words in this book on my computer and then printing them out and using a paper cutter to cut them into individual cards. The second time I converted the entire list into a form that would work in Anki, which I ended up not even using because I don't like Anki.

If there's anything I can say, it's that it worked. It was a pain in the ass but I'm fluent now because of it. And if you want my lists, let me know. I probably still have them somewhere on one of my computers.

During a high school co-op placement I was given the job of going through a ton of old as fuck files for the accounts receivable department of a telecommunications company, finding large tardy payments. Just a ton of reading through transactions where very few actually qualified for the list but you cannot miss one so you can't really skim them. I'm also fairly certain that most of the ones that made the list were associated with places that weren't even worth suing or harassing for the money so it felt so meaningless and tedious.

Four hours a week pouring through reports double checking accounts payable/receiving at a store level for employee mistakes. The Shang Tsung of work tasks as it slowly steals your soul.

Telemarketing. I quit that job real fucking fast.

@mechanical_ape: Um... fuck yes! Please do give me the list if it's easy to find!

opening a random combination lock that wasn't locking anything, with no idea what the combination was.

0,0,1

0,0,2

0,0,3...

@babychoochoo said:

Gosh, I remember doing this for Ragnarok Online. That was also when you have to sit down every free moment you have because the HP/SP regen is the slowest. I think my healer was stuck at level 40 for a whole month at one point, because death had a 1% EXP penalty and I kept dying.

The most tedious non-paying tasks I ever undertook were : Reaching level 99 in Ragnarok Online (I used a Shining Plant as the last kill to hit 99, btw); collecting and categorizing all of the most useful words in the American Heritage College Dictionary (Over 10,000 individual words so far, but with the formatting it comes to a lot more); Creating an enormous Minecraft structure that enclosed a large lake and had walls going halfway to the top of the skybox, with a floating roof above that, upon pulling a switch at the bottom, released an alternating pattern of water- and lava-falls to cascade down and encase the entire structure in a liquid shell. It was made by myself pre-creative mode, but I did use an inventory editor to give myself the tens of thousands of gold, lightstone, diamond, steel and glass that made up the structure. I placed every single block by hand in-game and extensively tested it to ensure the liquids cascaded properly and the switch with redstone repeaters could turn it on and off. Subsequent Minecraft updates broke a few parts of it, but I still have the zip files.

EDIT: Oh and one more thing that I guess could be added to the list, but I didn't think it was tedious at the time, because I'm crazy: For a PnP role-playing campaign I'm involved in, I made a town of 2619 people, and gave every single one of them a race, profession, gender, character level, character/npc class, age, height, weight, and alignment. I've got spreadsheets for days. Because I used dice rolls to determine parts of the list, there are some pretty amusing results from time to time. Like the stay-at-home housewife that happens to be a Chaotic Neutral 3rd level goblin. An RP group can get a lot of mileage out of something like that, and that's just one of the 2619.

The most tedious paying task I ever undertook was when I had a job weeding a grass seed field. It was about 40 acres, and because the grass was being raised for the seed, no other plants (including other varieties of grass) were allowed within. 40 acres of knee-high grass. One of the days I worked was 9.5 hours. It was drizzling at the time. I don't work there anymore.

While not a whole dictionary, I was required to make flash cards for a class (I think it was Advanced Hematology?) back when I was going to school to be a vet tech. As I recall, we had to make flash cards for the entire glossary. It took me the better part of a week with 4-5 hour shifts each night because I had to look up definitions and pictures for each card. In the end I was the only one in the class that made it through the entire list...and my teacher was a nice lady who gave everyone who even made the attempt full credit. I was less than pleased with that result.

Origami.

When I was in 1st grade, my class was involved in a "peace project" exchange with a school in Japan. Each class was supposed to make something that could be displayed in front of the other school that reflected that school's culture. Our teachers decided that we would make origami cranes that would be hung from the branches of a cherry tree in front of the Japanese school - one for each leaf.

Now, there are a lot of bloody leaves on a cherry tree, and the coordination needed to fold a paper crane is a big ask for 1st graders. Nevertheless, every day for three weeks we had to spend one class period folding the damn things so that we could have enough to meet our quota. Our work was carefully scrutinized to make sure that our cranes were properly folded and of a uniform size, and then we had to spend another day very carefully packing them up so that they wouldn't get crushed when we shipped them to Japan.

And what did the Japanese kids do? They spent all of five minutes going out and buying a few thousand of those little American flags on toothpicks. You know, the ones that cost a fraction of a penny? Then they just shipped them over in a FedEx box. They didn't even bother to take them out of the original bulk packaging either.

The experience taught me three things:

1. I learned to have a great deal of respect and pity for child sweatshop laborers.
2. Origami is the most useless, stupid, pointless pastime ever to exist in the history of histories. If you're going to spend time folding paper, at least make a paper airplane or something fun.
3. The Japanese are a bunch of troll-faced assholes. Seriously, fuck those guys.

It's been 25 years and I'm still bitter about it.

Worked in a water bottling plant for, like, 2 weeks. Bottles came down one conveyor belt, cardboard trays down the other. Pick up 6 bottles, put them on tray. Repeat for 6 hours, then go to the warehouse and lift bundles of 2 liters for a few more hours.

I'm just grateful that I had enough financial security to say "Fuck! This!" and search harder for a better job.

I once got a summer job where I moved furniture around the school I went to. I had to reorganise classrooms with one other guy, a bunch of handlers who didn't speak English were in charge and no one knew where anything was meant to go. Heavy, tiring, super boring for 6 hours a day.

Money was good though.

The 300 pullups in the final DLC pack for Mass Effect 3. I thought for sure there would be an achievement for it!

I would be glad to! So, I was 19 (I think) and my mom's friend's husband was starting his own car washing business. My mom asked me to help him out a bit and I said, "Sure. I could always use some extra money." Turns out he was in the veryearly stages of his business. How early you ask? Well, we drove to a parking lot in front of an office building and offered to wash their cars. It was a start up so I wasn't bothered by it, I've done stuff like this before so it was whatever to me.

4 hours into washing these nice people's cars while they were working, it began to rain. Normally you would stop, but nope, not him. We continued to wash those cars. Then, when I was done washing this one car (first car to get washed in the rain) he told me to dry it (he used a term but I don't remember what it was). I was like, "What? In the rain?" And he said, "Yeah" and went about washing other cars. So there I was, drying cars in therainand being utterly confused. I'm still confused to this very day (10 years later). He was able to start his car washing business but man, I still don't know what the hell happened that day.

I once watched the entirety of Babylon 5 over a six-day period one Christmas vacation.

I have no idea how I am still alive. That's a great show, but god damn, what the fuck was I thinking?

I gotta know, what was the combination?

@insane_shadowblade85: I'm pretty sure that doing that would just snap my mind like a fragile, dried twig. Mostly because reading it almost did. What.

@animasta: Why? You want to steal his stuff? I'm calling the police.

You spend three months converting an entire Japanese dictionary into online flashcard form.

Your diligence has slightly increased.

For an aeronautical engineering apprenticeship program I had to shape metal to exact sizes and shapes using nothing but hand tools, and a single millimeter over or under upon submitting it meant starting from scratch. The actual job required none of the skills learned during the apprenticeship either, so I essentially spent 8 months shaping thick pieces of metal into random shapes for nothing.

I was informed I was being made redundant a couple of years ago. They gave a three month 'consultation period' followed by three months official notice; so I faced 6 months of knowing that I would eventually be out of a job.

By the end of my first week of notice, the rest of my team had been let go and my own duties were so restricted that I would arrive in the morning and fulfilled by tasks within 20 minutes.

I then had nothing to do for the remaining 7 hours and 40 minutes of my day. Internet was restricted, iPods and the like were no allowed. I had to simply sit and do nothing all day every day.

Why did I not just leave? Simple, I'd worked for that company for 13 years, and if I completed my notice period they would have to pay me one months salary for each year I worked there. I tried to negotiate gardening leave. That was rejected. I tried to negotiate reduced working hours in exchange for a reduced salary also a no go. I wasn't allowed to help out on other teams as they were worried that I'd classify it as 'retraining' and therefore challenge the redundancy.

My day was insane. I learnt to meditate. I smuggled in e-books formatted in word documents interspersed with fake graphs. I made a 'choose your own adventure' game in Excel. I planned a backpacking round-the-world trip and I wrote many long rambling stream of consciousness passages and lists in Word.

Being paid to sit and do nothing sounds like some peoples idea of heaven. It isn't. It is soul crushing in the extreme. The monotony truly gets to you and you become stressed beyond belief.

The day I walked out of that office for the last time it felt like the world had been lifted from my chest.

Sounds like they were trying to bore you into leaving early so they would not have to pay the redundancy.

@splodge: Nailed it. My determination to not let them get out easy was pretty much my primary motivator to get through that period.

I would have bought a monstrously large whiteboard, some markers, and every day in the smallest writing possible I would fill it in with "Things I am going to do with my redundancy payment."

i vaguely remember playing some jrpg and farming a chest or something for a rare drop. every time i didn't get the drop i'd have to pause, quit out, and reload the game. it only lasted a few hours, but that's when i realized that farming sucks.

Something recent that comes to mind is trying to get the Mad Warrior armour set in Dark Souls 2.

There is only a small chance each time you visit the bonfire that the NPC red phantom will spawn, he is fairly tough to kill, and he has a rare chance to drop a piece of his armour or weapon. The more times you kill him, the less likely it is to find another piece of the set. Cue multiple days and over 6 hours of running from the bonfire, climbing a ladder, running over to see if he has spawned, running back, going up the ladder, checking if he's there, killing him, not getting an item, running back and forth 15 times, killing him again... You also need to do all this offline because it is in the Belfry so you'll be invaded and get ganked while trying to fight him or the fog will block the door as you are trying to run back to the bonfire.

I worked in a sandwich assembly line for two days. The shifts amounted to something like 21 hours in total over those 48 hours. It was soul-crushingly tedious, while still being exhaustively demanding.

Life.

Playing Bravely Default.