Saturday, April 11, 2020

Lazy People That Did Hard Jobs The Easiest Ways


This fun thread had people describe times they witnessed lazy people be tasked with the notoriously difficult jobs, and from there, dig up the easiest ways to perform those hard tasks. The mind is an impossibly complex machine, and one that can craft ingenious ways for accomplishing tough tasks, through the use of shortcuts. This thread brought to mind that one time a lazy navy officer ended up being a lazy genius, while on the job.

1.

Text - jaymeekae • 104d I once was a temp at a tiny office on a construction site in around 2003. I was only there for one day while the regular person was on some training. They sat me down and told me that I just needed to copy all these numbers from one program to another. So I selected them, hit ctrl c and ctrl v. They stared at me. Turns out about 60% of this woman's time had been spent manually typing numbers from one place to another.

2.

Text - mcrackin • 104d I work in finance at a large multinational corporation. I feel like a big part of our job is to just stop doing things and wait to see who complains. If someone complains, we keep doing it, if silence, then we call it a "controlled drop" and put it on our performance review for creating efficiencies.

3.

Text - Daxos157 • 104d I work in a semi-warehouse environment and we have to track where items are at all times. When we move X item from location A to location B we had to type out the to and from locations. We do this hundreds of times a shift. I went online to a free barcode maker website and spent about 20 minutes making location barcodes. I save hours a day by scanning barcodes.

4.

Text - AngelusCaedo • 104d In high school we had to do four book reports every year. A friend of mine did his on each Lord of the Rings books and the Hobbit freshman year and turned in the same four book reports for the rest of his time in high school. You switched english teachers every year so no one ever caught on. I was never brave enough to try the same thing.

5.

Text - PaddyPumpkin • 104d I worked a summer at a mortgage company as an assistant to the underwriters. My only job was printing documents and then hole-punching them to put in folders. They had a super fancy xerox printer that basically did my entire job for me, but the underwriters at this company didn't know how to click through printer settings to make the machine hole-punch as it was being printed. I showed them how to do it, and they resisted it suuuuper hard (like they didn't trust it? Id

6.

Text - BobT21 • 104d A long time ago I was sent to help a team that was designing some analog test equipment. Big problem was when two of the parts were at different temperatures the calibration would go off. They wanted me to design a circuit to measure the temperatures of the two parts and apply a correction. I solved the problem by putting both parts on the same heat sink so they would be at the same temperature. It worked.

7.

Text - UltraRunningKid • 104d A 3 3 Awards Boss hated Excel to the point where he didn't want us using formulas because "you can't trust them to be right" so we needed to "do all the calculations by hand or on a calculator" He would give me a spreadsheet once or twice a week that required lets say, 45 seconds to do, but maybe 7 hours by hand and he told me to "go to starbucks or something and crank it out" He thought that since I pasted as values and he couldn't see the formulas that I did it by

8.

Text - Nametoholdaplace • 104d 3 6 Awards Herding yak with a drone takes the cake for me. They run from it, and oddly fear it. Which is surprising considering they have literally zero aerial predators. We only did it a few times because it really makes them uneasy, and doesn't treat them well. But it is very effective and easy, and you can herd them from over 1/2 a mile a way from inside the house. edit: Im really surprised how much this blew up. Ive never had some many post replies, but III try

9.

Text - NoCountryForOldPete • 104d 3 1 Award Maybe not the most impressive story here, but I thought it was a great side-step of effort nonetheless: Co-worker of mine had to get rid of a smaller junk fiberglass boat with no trailer. Our other co- workers are all telling him how much time and money he's going to need to spend to get rid of it, and he's just saying "Oh, is that so?" He took off one day, and sat down on his lawn with a cooler of beer. That day was garbage day. Inevitably, the trash

10.

Text - codymreese • 104d 3 1 Award At my last job, a truck suspension shop, we did inventory every December and it was someone's job to count all the washers and screws of every size. It was my first inventory and I casually mentioned that they should just weigh one screw or washer, then weigh them all and divide the weight to get the count. Everyone looked at me like I had given them the key to the universe. Counting washers and screws went from a day or two, to just a few hours.

11.

Text - BreatheMyStink • 104d I was working a kids' chess summer camp with this guy who just horked down pot like you wouldn't believe (still a far, far better chess player than me). One day, the kids were being particularly rambunctious and I told him he had to take them outside to get their energy out. He had them spend the next hour doing "American Ninja Warrior" on the jungle gym/ playground. I hadn't even heard of the show, but it was a group of young boys like 6-12, so they all adored it. T

12.

Text - DeathSpiral321 • 104d 1 Award I'm in corporate accounting, and l'm the only one in my department with a CPA. Of course, I have to take continuing education for my license, and I usually take as many hours of Excel courses as I can each year. By learning the keyboard shortcuts, advanced formulas, and a bunch of useful hidden features in Excel, I'm able to get most of my work done in less than 2 hours, then spend the rest of the day browsing Reddit and watching YouTube videos. Thank goodnes

13.

Text - explision • 104d 3 2 Awards Worked in a huge hotel by the airport*. We had layover with over 400 people, I think we were 3 employees. They had buffet for dinner and then left to go to bed since it was 1 or 2 am. Rule was, we should always go to the room and pick up as many plates as we could and then bring them to the cleaner. Took for ages and I wanted to go home. I decided to roll out the cart and collect the plates and put them on the cart. Guest were seeing it and started putting thei

14.

Text - wilksonator • 104d 1 Award Was a temp. Got hired for the day to print 30 packets with 100 pages each. Why would it take a day? I asked 'Our printer doesn't collate the pages so it will take you the day to sort the pages into the 30 packets" they said. Right. It was a standard office Xerox printer. It took me all of 30 seconds to find and click the 'collate' button. Clicked the 'staple' button while at it. All got printed by itself into nice stapled packets and I got paid to browse interne

15.

Text - silencedrop66 • 104d Was tiling a bathroom floor. One young guy I was working with was cleaning up when we were done. I told him to take the leftover tile back downstairs to the truck, and then went back to cleaning what I was doing. Ten seconds later I hear this huge crash and then a soft "oh, right." He had gone out onto the balcony and dropped them down to the truck, shattering over $100 worth of tile. He said he "thought it would be faster". He wasn't exactly wrong!

16.

Text - precipiceblades • 104d Worked as a cashier during the holiday season back when i was 16. The supermarket was selling drinks by the boxes and at that time, we only had barcode scanners that was at the front of the computer. No gun type scanners existed. I was lazy and didn't want to carry boxes up to the scanner. So i politely asked my customers if i could carve out the barcode from their box to scan and keep. Some agreed some didn't want to but eventually i managed to amass all the barcod

17.

Text - KatakataBijaksana • 104d 3 1 Award Worked construction right out of high school to save money for school. Once every other week, we'd get a shipment of 100's of door parts, and they made me match serial numbers to parts and orders and confirm we got everything, then organize it allI. It literally took 16 hours AT LEAST. And time moved so slowly. So I got fed up with it and made a python app that would take a list of pictures, extract text from the pictures, compare it to a order receipt,

18.

Text - clickerroy • 104d 3 1 Award Automated 70% of my job in a large finance firm as an intern. Never disclosed it and got paid easy money for 6 months. I spent the time doing courses and applying for my grad school. Got my admission letter during the final 2 weeks of my internship and never looked back. Pro Tip: Python and Excel can be your best friend. Obligatory edit: I went to sleep and this thread blew up. Thank you for your stories, questions and comments. I'm trying to get to as many as

19.

Text - 3 1 Award There's a story that l've heard a few dozen times about a toothpaste company that had accidentally sent out cases of their product that had a few empty single boxes of toothpaste. The company had endeavored, not only to rectify their mistake, but to ensure they did not repeat it. They hired an engineering company that designed a scale, and alarm shutdown system. If an empty carton was passed down the production line, klaxons would be triggered, and a full stop would initiate unt

20.

Text - koenigstig • 104d My parents were having a summer get-together a couple of years ago and my dad wanted my brother and me to dig a small pit for a bonfire. He handed us two shovels and left us to dig, My brother went and started up our old tractor, drove it across the lawn, dropped the bucket into the earth and drove forward a few feet. The pit ended up a little larger than what we had planned but once we lined it with stones it was actually a pretty nice pit. *Edited "my brother and I" to

21.

Text - bassta • 104d My girlfriend is lawyer and I'm developer. At her place they manually compare documents they received after the other party signed them. It is not uncomen the other party to add something or remove something from contract without track changes etc. Sol taught her how to use diff/ compare program that works not only with code, but all kind of docs. She already cought some attempts for the other side to modify long contracts without consent. So comparing docs went from hour lo

22.

Text - seancurry1 • 104d 3 1 Award I read a comment on here a while back about a college kid who picked up an office job over one summer. He became friends with an older lady at the front desk who always needed help figuring out Excel. He kept finding shortcuts for her, and eventually wrote scripts for her that took a load of work off her plate. By the end of the summer he had made her job so easy that they decided they didn't need her to do it anymore. They fired her.

23.

Text - TacticalLeemur • 104d I have an example of how the truly lazy will sabotage tracking so no one knows shit is broken. There was this guy at a software company that does integrated software systems. He hated his boss and his job and apparently most of his team. Every time he was assigned a bug to fix, he would mark it resolved and assign it to a no-reply email address associated with the team. The odd thing that I don't understand is how he managed to keep issues from getting escalated to o

24.

Text - FastWalkingShortGuy • 104d I did this. A few years back, I was roommates with a super mechanically inclined dude. Our top-loading clothes washer stopped working well because the lid got a little warped and didn't trip the safe switch for the spin cycle to run anymore. He was all geared up to pull the washer out, take it apart, bend the lid back into proper shape, and reseat the sensor so it would run properly. I told him to hold off; I put a load of laundry in, and popped a quarter inch s

25.

Text - commenting_bastard • 104d My dad and I were working on my grandma's water heater a couple of years ago, we needed a cork or something to go over the end of the pipe. I had a bottle of coke in my hand, I downed the coke and put the cap on the end of the pipe as a joke but it fit perfectly so we kept it there. When my grandma sold the house 5 years later that cap was still on the end of the pipe. I wasn't necessarily the laziest person but I was the DLH (designated light holder) and I was p

26.

Text - EmirFassad • 104d In one of my early IT jobs I spent about two months automating everything I did. Thereafter, I spent my days in air-conditioned isolation reading, hacking out entirely unrelated programs, engaging in protracted debates on UseNet and responding to the very rare client problem. Things seemed to be running smoothly so I took a couple weeks of vacation. When I returned from holiday I was told that everything had run so smoothly in my absence that my services would no longer

27.

Text - KnowanUKnow• 104d The joys of being a parent. As the parent of 2 hyperactive boys, I invented a game called the steamroller game. I would lie down across one end of the bed and the kids would start jumping. At some random point I would make a motor noise and roll across the bed. If they didn't jump in time I would roll right over them. They loved that game. I just invented it because I wanted to lie down for a few minutes.

28.

Text - ogdeloon • 104d Teacher here! We have a K-3rd grade classroom with mixed ages. This year, we decided to assign a big project in pairs. We have a 3rd grade boy who's cynical, argumentative, and refuses to do work even though he's extremely intelligent and capable. We decided in an effort to get work out of him, we'd pair him with a very energetic kindergarten boy that has underdeveloped, 5- year old, reading and writing skills. Anyway, the older boy typed sentences on the computer in big 2

29.

Text - NotThisFucker • 104d I am in rhat quote and I don't like it. When I was at university I had an IT helpdesk job for one of the colleges. My team was tasked with taking inventory on every computer in every room of like 5 buildings. Computer ame, some college ID code, the Dell serial number, all kinds of stuff. I mean it took ages to gather all the information in just ine room. About a week into the process, I decided that l'd had enough of manuall writing everything down. On my work machine

30.

Text - liquid_nation • 104d One time We were selling an electric lift at work and I loaded it with the forklift, but we had to push it all the way into his truck at a weird angle. They had some Ideas but before they could stop me from doing it the way I wanted I just pushed in in by its forks with my forks.. Touched tips all the way in worked perfectly. I always try to do as much as I possibly can without getting out of the forklift.

31.

Text - shaneo88 • 104d I had an excel order form in my last job that required us to enter all hardware items from all suppliers in by hand I had to completely rewrite the existing script that pulled the hardware for the one supplier that it worked on but it went from being a time consuming, mistake prone job to clicking a button on the order form and it doing everything and taking maybe 2 seconds for a huge job. Figuring out dynamic named ranges and getting them to work with drop down boxes was

32.

Text - dudethrowme • 104d Got hired for a 3 week temp job that was transporting strings of text from a text document that the companies app produced, into separate excel sheets relating to what the string in the text document was. It was hundreds of thousands of lines of records of which office was printing, calling, emailing, basically any time the network was used. They were making graphs about how much of call time was to what department/ customer/etc, and things like that. Yeah, just wrote a

33.

Text - Fromhe • 104d I used to deliver beer. I did not like delivering beer. I may have ended up with 30 stops in a day, including deliveries that the customer would call in to our office for. I used to bring extra beer and blank invoices with me on the truck, to prevent having to drive back to my warehouse to deliver one keg to a place that I was currently across the street from. 7 years later, the driver of that route is still doing that.

34.

Text - BackgroundDrider • 104d Someone gave me a report they'd been doing manually for literally years, using nothing but excel and access databases that took two people upwards of nearly three hours to complete. Got that shit automated down to 30 seconds in a few days. I'm not about your stupid v-lookup bullshit, Brittany.

35.

Text - SirSithsalot • 104d I remember having to peel 20kg of charred eggplant at a restaurant I worked in. I asked the chef if there was an easier way to do it. His reply was "yep, get someone else to do it"

36.

Text - poprdog • 104d Back in high school I was taking a chemistry test. Our teacher gave us a packet of 150 random questions with the answers on it where 50 would be on the final test. We could use our notes and bring anything in we wanted for the test (no electronics) His idea was nobody was going to able to look through the randomly ordered packet of questions and answers and be able to answer all the questions in the hour we had so it was fine to give us. Anyways here comes test day and my f

37.

Text - natbentley • 104d In my first proper job, I got unexpectedly promoted to a mixed developer/sysadmin role, where a large part of my job was setting up accounts for students, giving them access to some form of public webspace, emails and mailing lists, etc. The guy before me had done everything by hand so the tasks took hours to do - being lazy I scripted/automated the lot, got it down to a handful of minutes work, then spent the rest of the day reading in the peace and quiet of the server

38.

Text - InsertBluescreenHere • 104d Was me. Supervisor wanted me and another guy mark the hydraulic hoses in this pit so 2nd shift could jump right in and start replacing. Fine but that involves someone gettin a harness, waiting for security to come sniff the pit for gasses, fill out confined space forms, get them signed, etc. I asked do they have to be marked in any order or way? Supervisor said no just need some kinda identifying mark. So i said ok got it. Told the other guy to hop on my cart "

39.

Text - PM_ME_YOUR_BACHATA • 104d 1 Award Eating cheetos with chopsticks so you don't have to wipe your fingers while playing videogames.

40.

Text - n0etic • 104d I did one of my university degrees through distance ed. Had one class where the prof was a nightmare and would assign hundreds of pages of readings per week. Nobody could keep up because of the sheer volume. On top of that it was a pain to try and read them because they were all pdfs and tablets werent really affordable yet. Come midterm time and the exam is 50 multiple choice questions and it's open book because it's distance ed so you can't enforce no materials anyway. I'd

Submitted by:

Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)