06-30-2004, 09:27 PM
One of my first jobs when I was younger was doing data entry for a check supply company; very boring. Youâd enter their address into a computer with a form explaining what types of checks they wanted, all day, every day. Minimum quota was 75 orders processed an hour. That year was the first time I ever sat down and listened to my entire CD collection alphabetically from start to finish â 17 times. (By the way, in a 40-hour week, you can listen to about 500-600 songs a week, depending on if you want your lunches silent.)
:blink:
The job I got âpromotedâ to from there was surreal â they called it Error Checking. Basically, you sit at a desk in a very nice office, with a very nice view, doing almost nothing. About 10 times a day, a bizarre piece of paper crosses your desk, and itâs your job to handle it. These are the check orders taken by phone or mail that the keyers and supervisors couldnât figure out what to do with.
I got one where the customer had kept saying on the phone to send it to an address on âThe Peachâ in California, then hung up. It took a caffeine-deprived leap of intuition to figure out thatâs slang for the Pacific Coast Highway.
Another lady filled her order form out meticulously â but the order form was from 13 years before, and we didnât really have those swell prices or groovy designs anymore.
Still another was filled out in what was rather fluent Klingon. (You canât go verbatim English-Klingon with such a small vocabulary, but it was clever.) The keyer was apparently catastrophically bored and had a sense of humor that got him reprimanded; donât know how that one got past the sup. (Maybe they thought it was Russian?)
My favorite was a phone order slip that had only a name and address, and some poor phone rep had scrawled, âMan is insane, just send him something.â Iâve retained that as my motto for my home / eBay business. It seems to work very well for me.
:P
:blink:
The job I got âpromotedâ to from there was surreal â they called it Error Checking. Basically, you sit at a desk in a very nice office, with a very nice view, doing almost nothing. About 10 times a day, a bizarre piece of paper crosses your desk, and itâs your job to handle it. These are the check orders taken by phone or mail that the keyers and supervisors couldnât figure out what to do with.
I got one where the customer had kept saying on the phone to send it to an address on âThe Peachâ in California, then hung up. It took a caffeine-deprived leap of intuition to figure out thatâs slang for the Pacific Coast Highway.
Another lady filled her order form out meticulously â but the order form was from 13 years before, and we didnât really have those swell prices or groovy designs anymore.
Still another was filled out in what was rather fluent Klingon. (You canât go verbatim English-Klingon with such a small vocabulary, but it was clever.) The keyer was apparently catastrophically bored and had a sense of humor that got him reprimanded; donât know how that one got past the sup. (Maybe they thought it was Russian?)
My favorite was a phone order slip that had only a name and address, and some poor phone rep had scrawled, âMan is insane, just send him something.â Iâve retained that as my motto for my home / eBay business. It seems to work very well for me.
:P