ON the seventh hour of his 8½-hour shift at a Midtown office building, Laz, 41, looks weary as he stands with his hands clasped in front of him.
“The standing is the worst part,” says the security guard of three years.
Invisibly tethered to his post, he paces back and forth a few feet from his original spot to keep the blood moving in his legs. Listening to music is forbidden. Dispensing directions to lost guests is the extent of his socializing.
The good part, Laz says, is meeting the celebrities and athletes that come through, though “meet” is defined loosely, considering he never gets to converse with them, just nod and open the guarded glass gates with a smile.
But compared to his old job, this gig’s a dream.
“You want to talk about boring? I was a die-cutter before this,” Laz says. For 15 years, he manned a machine at a Manhattan paper-product plant, cutting identical stationery pads and spiral-bound notebooks, day in and day out.
“It was the same thing every day. Here, it’s the same routine, but at least different things are going on.”
New York City is known for its multi-taskers, whose frantic professional lives would implode without their day planners and BlackBerrys. But on the other end of the occupational spectrum are those whose entire 9-to-5 revolves around doing the same mind-numbing tasks all day, every day. And as any museum attendant, piecemeal factory worker or corporate paper-pusher can tell you, surviving a boring job an achingly repetitive, unstimulating, comatose-inducing job is a challenge in itself.
Andy, 24, who works the midnight shift as a doorman at a downtown Manhattan apartment complex, says an active imagination and a fully loaded iPod are his only saving graces.
“Hardly anyone comes through the doors besides the random drunk resident,” he says. “Sometimes I get so bored I end up making up stories about them. Some girl will come stumbling in at 4 a.m. in a party dress and carrying her shoes, with some guy supporting her. Maybe he’s her boyfriend.” He shrugs. “Or maybe he’s the guy she’s cheating on him with.”
Tali Kapadia, now a 28-year-old master’s student at Teachers College at Columbia University, shivers to recall a stint as a file clerk for a health-care conglomerate. Each day, she’d receive a stack of patients’ records at least 3 feet high, and would file them all in silence in an isolated back corner of the office.
When the task was completed – usually six hours later – she moved on to opening mail.
“Sadly, opening envelopes was the entertaining part of my day because that’s when I could actually talk with the three other women working in the office,” she says.
A relative concept
But what makes a job “boring”? Endless repetition, sure. But it may also be due to the environment you’re working in. For those stuck in a corporate office structure, “it’s the increased paperwork and form-filling, the bureaucracy,” says Sandi Mann, an occupational psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. “It seems like the number of meetings has greatly increased.”
Mann believes such job monotony is on the rise, a case she made in a recent article in the British magazine The Psychologist. The culprit, she says, is cubicle-farm jobs that reduce the worker to a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine.
“People’s jobs are much further removed from some of the reality. Some of it’s computerized now,” she says. “We don’t have as much contact with the aim of the job we’re distanced from it.”
In a 2006 survey of workplace boredom by a British teacher-training agency, 61 percent of respondents said they were mainly bored because of the lack of challenge in their jobs, and 60 percent said that not using their skills or knowledge made life tedious. Half of the respondents said the boredom stemmed from doing the same thing every day.
However, “boring” is a subjective label, says Andrea Kay, a career consultant and author of “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Change Careers.” For people who are naturally introverted or crave structure, isolating or repetitive work can be a good match.
“Even though it may seem boring to someone else, it’s perfect for them,” she says.
In fact, Kay remembers having two clients – one with autism and the other with a compulsive disorder – who actually preferred having so-called boring jobs.
“She loved it! She absolutely loved it,” Kay says of the compulsive client, who worked in data entry. “Whenever we’d go out of that zone, she’d get really uncomfortable and say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’ “
That sounds about right, says Seth Kaplan, a professor of industrial-organizational psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Compulsive people tend to be detail-oriented, he says, which can align well with repetitious jobs.
“You look at people with mental retardation – they do these piecemeal kind of jobs because to them, since they have lower cognitive functioning, it’s stimulating, whereas to us it wouldn’t be as stimulating.”
On the flip side, some believe that people of high intelligence are more easily bored than average workers; narcissists have likewise been thought to be less tolerant of tedium. A 2005 study that incorporated the Boredom Proneness Scale, a 28-question test, suggests that those who need more variety (who tend to be men more often than women) and those with extroverted personalities are more susceptible to stagnation.
However, other studies suggest otherwise, showing that extroverts are better equipped to fulfill their need for stimulation by devising creative ways to execute otherwise dull tasks.
A pain in the neck
Getting a daily dose of drudgery can be more than an aggravation – it can lead to depression and other problems.
“People in those jobs tend to experience more stress and physical problems. There are symptoms like headaches, back pain,” says Kaplan. And they “tend to report lower satisfaction with their life in general.”
In a new survey by the research firm Sirota Survey Intelligence, bored employees actually demonstrated more discontent than those who were overworked, reporting significantly less job satisfaction and pride in their accomplishments.
The main problem with having a boring job is that there’s less intrinsic motivation to work hard in a position where one has little autonomy, says Kaplan.
“You’re not necessarily learning or growing from the job. So in a sense, you’re not as invested in it,” he says.
The simplest way to alleviate this problem is to try to make the job meaningful. Sarah Steed, who’s held administrative office positions for several years, focuses on the bright side of her job, which includes data entry, answering phones and filing.
“The job itself is very tedious, very boring,” the 23-year-old Manhattanite emphasizes more than once. “The reason I’m doing the admin work is that I’m working directly under entrepreneurs. It’s a learning process for me,” says Steed, who’s looking to own her own business one day. Meeting interesting people and working with upbeat colleagues help maintain her sanity, she adds.
Amanda Miller also leaned heavily on co-workers to get through the day, though perhaps in a different way. As a former financial recruiter for a Manhattan agency, the 22-year-old Manhattanite cold-called financial companies with a scripted routine for eight hours a day. To pass the time, she checked her Facebook account and surfed Monster.com to find another job, but she also devised a game with a similarly dissatisfied colleague who sat across from her.
“He drew a picture of a butt on an index card and wrote ‘ass’ across the top in pink highlighter,” she says. “Whenever he would have a bad cold-call, he would hold up the ‘ass’ sign to me, most likely when I was on a call myself. I made one, and we would try to flash it to each other without our supervisors seeing.”
Compared to Laz the security guard’s gig, Miller’s cushy desk job might seem like a joy ride. But for her it was akin to a stint on a chain gang.
“They told me it was going to be a fast-paced environment that revolved around the ever-changing world of finance, that every day was going to be different, and could I possibly live up to the challenge,” she recalls. “Little did I know the only challenge of that job was to keep myself from using my black Bic pens to gouge my eyes out.”
Incidentally, Miller and her co-worker were on the right track – mental exercises, such as doodling, are among the things that may add stimulation to a listless worker’s day, says Mann (though drawing pictures of butts is not required). Corporations can also do their part to minimize monotony.
“Reducing automation, not robotizing people by giving them scripts they have to say, giving them empowerment these are all things that can lessen the boredom,” she says.
And if there’s absolutely no silver lining? The best you can do, says Kay, is “know that this isn’t forever.”
DENIZENS OF DULLSVILLE
Teachers may be underpaid, but at least they’re stimulated. Secretarial work, on the other hand, offers all the excitement of a filibustering marathon on C-Span.
That was among the findings of a survey by the UK’s Training and Development Agency for Schools, which ranked professional jobs on a “Workplace Boredom Index.” The results:
Administrative and secretarial work takes the cake when it comes to tedium, topping the scale with a score of 10.
Manufacturing and sales were the second and
third runners-up, with an 8.1 and a 7.8, followed by
marketing (7.7) and telecommunications (7.5).
The least boring jobs were teaching, which rated
a 4.0, and healthcare, which scored a 5.1.