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 Post subject: Oh, the pain
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 5:39 pm 
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Joined: Tue May 21, 2002 12:00 am
Posts: 12405
Location: The things, they hurt
So, what's the most boring, laborious, nitpicking, annoying, brain-numbing painstaking work you've ever done? I need a few horror stories to feel better.

I spent the best part of the last three hours correcting the punctuation, hyphenation, and date formatting in a 59 page report I wrote, including the footnotes. Aaargh! Footnotes! And it was worse than necessary because I had to correct the incorrect hyphenation of names inserted by my editor.

And now I'm having an adventures in Chinese font downloads. Finally found one font family that was useful to me, took forever to download it (my connection's crapping out and Chinese fonts are huge), installed it, and then found that InDesign doesn't recognize it because it's not Unicode. Or something. I don't know what I'm talking about. But I have to start searching all over again for something that will work. Bilingual typesetting for beginners, on a nonexistent budget. Yay.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 5:47 pm 
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Joined: Sat Jan 29, 2005 10:18 am
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Location: Save the Kakapo!
Working hotline customer service. Enough said.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 5:54 pm 
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Location: in the library, with the lead pipe
I'm in my first year of law school. :woe:

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 6:53 pm 
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Website: http://www.livejournal.com/users/kirby1024/
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Location: Real Life. It's Scary.
Converting an entire management textbook into a ASCII-marked up document readable by blind people. Including interpreting all the pretty diagrams and pictures scattered throughout the book into paragraph form.

It took me over 40 billable hours to get it done. To this day, I shudder involuntarily whenever I have to scan modern textbooks, because they are always full of diagrams and pictures that don't actually contribute anything but are there for people who need pictures to understand the text but I have to scan it in anyway because we have to produce a document that's a faithful reproduction of the original text!

[deep breath]

Okay, I'm feeling better now...

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 8:21 pm 
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AOL: Surgoshan
My ISP. That's a whole 'nother kettle of ballgames, there.

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 9:15 pm 
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Website: http://www.lonelyahava.com
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Location: The Great White Maine
I'm a 411 operator... I deal with people looking for things that they don't the name of or where it is, and all kinds of other things. It's mind numbing and dull and has introduced me to the sheer stupidity that is out there in our country. it honestly makes me quite violent at some points. But that's just me.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 10:42 pm 
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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2005 10:34 pm
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Website: http://www.louisvillestartups.com
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Nitpicking: Our managers went Big Brother on us. They review each nights video's to see if we were standing around (which we frequently are when we have no work to do and have done all of the nights duties). Then they nitpick each and every action.

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:22 pm 
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Website: http://Wireball.com/
Location: Hawthorne, CA
My job imaging workstations at a naval base in Nevada required me to drive for nearly two hours to reach it, and if I was 5 minutes late I got yelled at, but if I was 15 minutes early I still had to sign in at the officially required sign-in time, and they wouldn't allow us to work ten-hour days; we had to work eight hour days and burn an extra four hours each week commuting. Mandatory 1-hour lunch breaks. After everything was said and done, I had two waking hours each day to myself (it would have been three, except that it takes me an hour to fall asleep most nights). Their process was completely messed up so nothing worked, and at the end of each work day they would give us the "pep talk" which consisted of us all having to gather around so they could tell us that we were doing a terrible job and reminding us that they could get rid of any of us at any time they wanted to.

I was so happy when they fired me for having a beard (Nevada being a so-called "right-to-work" state, which means they can fire you for any reason, they didn't tell me what they were firing me for, but I suspect it was that). And I even got paid for that day, because they got their wires crossed and even though they fired me in the morning after I'd spent two hours in a car to get there, they didn't get me off the time sheets until the afternoon. Of course, since I'd carpooled, I was stuck there until quitting time. At least the guard house outside of the base was air conditioned.

Note: this was the civilian contractor responsible for all this **** - the military personnel were great.

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 2:35 am 
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I should have gotten paid today.

I didn't.

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 3:50 am 
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Location: The things, they hurt
I started the layout on my stupid report a couple of days ago, but then my boss spotted more mistakes, I spent yesterday fixing them, and now I have to do the layout over again from scratch.

Plus I think I'm gonna have to shell out the $150 on a font pack. Blargh. I bet I'm going to buy them, install them, and find that InDesign thinks they don't exist.

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 11:27 am 
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Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2006 11:14 am
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Location: Respect Gary Gygax.
Finely chopping 10kg (thats a bloody huge amount) of parsley. And cutting the end 3 cms off the end of your left index finger into the container you just put all your nicely cut parsely into.

The ruining of the parsely hurt more than the finger. saved the 3cm of my finger though.

Or a 2000 word essay on a 100 word poem. English Lit, woo!

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 12:58 pm 
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AOL: SimonJester1v1
Location: Look at me still talking when there's Science to do!
A naval base in NEVADA?!

I can think of no place on Earth where it would make significantly less sense to place a naval base than Nevada. There are places that would make no MORE sense, but none that would make LESS... :bert:

Seriously, the US government has a serious problem with contractors. In many cases, the worst parts of government bureaucracy are produced, not by the bureaucracy itself, but by the way the bureaucracy interacts with the contractors. Or with revised accounting systems (my father, who works at NASA, could tell you ALL about that)...

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 9:14 pm 
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Website: http://Wireball.com/
Location: Hawthorne, CA
Woops, I should have said a Naval Air Station. All fighter jets and helicopters and such. The fighter jets would take off and immediately go to afterburner, turning tightly a mere hundred or so feet overhead, but it wasn't so bad if one plugged ones ears, and was fun to watch.

Yes, I get the impression that the accounting systems and such were highly complex and involved. That was probably a lowest-bid contractor, too.

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 Post subject:
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 10:16 pm 
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Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2003 12:00 am
Posts: 557
Location: 9,000 ft asl
One summer in highschool I worked on a production line in a christian book warehouse, packing boxes. If you didn't get at least 80 done per day you were considered "slow." The cardboard and glue from the packing tape were murder on the hands, and I still remember the exact motions for sealing a cardboard box shut. I kept a small empty box on my workstation which I stabbed with an exacto knife every so often in a fit of frustration, by the end of the summer it was full of holes.

The one redeeming part of the job were the people I worked with. They were all super cool, we got to yell at each other on the production line all day, and over lunch we'd play volleyball or euchre.

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