Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Lazy Workers That Used Shortcuts In Their Jobs


This fun AskReddit thread takes a look at various workers that discovered shortcuts in their various lines of work to accomplish jobs the easiest ways possible. It's remarkable what kinds of paths can be opened up by someone motivated by the burning desire to not have to work too hard. 

1.

Text - john_C_random • 4h 1 Award I worked 'goods in' for an aircraft manufacturer as a summer job at university. Parts would arrive, we'd open them and key in all the details into a terminal. That bit was long winded. I discovered the terminal keyboard has assignable shortcuts, and set up a bunch of them for all the boilerplate such that keying in an item was about six keystrokes. Saved myself and my workmate hours every day, which we would spend pranking each other, other warehouse staff and s

2.

Text - thisbuttonsucks • 4h One of my favorite stories from my youth was "The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail". I got fed-up with hand writing itemized sub-orders at work, so I set up a spreadsheet that you can just fill out. Then I got tired of having more than one program open, and not being able to search within & among those order sheets (at least not automatically, or easily), so I'm having our FileMaker guy integrate it into our greater ordering & invoicing system. I was frustrate

3.

Text - I became so irritated with having to fill out a multi-page, printed spreadsheet for every single order (sometimes just one item, two pages in [and frequently, there would be those pesky itemized sub orders]) that I condensed the items into "most used", put them all on one easy to read sheet, and encouraged my co-worker to simply write out the more uncommon items at the bottom. Basically, I hate busy work, and paper invariably leads to busy work. I have tried to reduce the use of paper in

4.

Text - daithisfw • 6h I knew a guy who had a low level data/reporting job. He had several daily/weekly work responsibilities, including a bunch of reports that needed quite a bit of tweaking from raw data to finished product. But like I said, low level. We didn't find out until way later, but he had set up macros for each of his major responsibilities where he could. Once set up, he'd just run the macros to do his work, but then he'd (smartly) hold off on delivering the reports until just a litt

5.

Text - Sumjhumms • 5h 1 Award I'm doing it right now, automated data cleaning in Python. My coworkers don't know about it, so something that takes me 10 mins at most takes them 2 hours.

6.

Text - sonia72quebec•4h 1 Award Years ago as a student I got a job stocking shelves. Guys were carrying the heavy boxes, put them on the floor and bend each time to pick up the items to put on the shelves. I was maybe a light 100 pounds (woman) and carrying the boxes was just killing me physically. So one day I had an idea. I put the box on a old desk chair and rolled it around. No more carrying and no more bending! Funny thing is that, instead of doing the same thing, most of the guys called me

7.

Text - sonia72quebec •4h E 1 Award Years ago as a student I got a job stocking shelves. Guys were carrying the heavy boxes, put them on the floor and bend each time to pick up the items to put on the shelves. I was maybe a light 100 pounds (woman) and carrying the boxes was just killing me physically. So one day I had an idea. I put the box on a old desk chair and rolled it around. No more carrying and no more bending! Funny thing is that, instead of doing the same thing, most of the guys called

8.

Text - Downvotesdarksouls • 4h 1 Award My brother gave my oldest nephew 10 dollars a week if he did all his chores with out needing to be told or complaining. One day he gets home early from work and sees. The neighbor kid tossing a bag in the trash. He asks him what he is doing and the kid says he gets 5 bucks a week to take care a few chores. My nephew outsourced his chores. Reply 1 37.7k ...

9.

Text - FutureRenaissanceMan • 5h An engineer spent hours developing a program so they could start the coffee pot from their desk and not have to wait for coffee when arriving in the break room. Reply 1 14.4k ...

10.

Text - JuiceBox1 • 5h Walkie Talkie's. In every job l've ever had these things make your day far less labor intensive if used correctly. Reply 1 3.7k ...

11.

Text - My ex-boss gave me an excel sheet. 124.000 rows excel sheet. Had all the company customer data per row - twice. In some of those duplicates there was an error. She needed me to go over the list one row by row to check for mistakes and mark all the faulty entries I could find. Through 124.000 rows. She wanted me to do that using the arrow-down key and my mouse. I thanked her. I sat down. Invested half an hour into Google. Copy pasted some parts of this formula, then some parts of that. Fin

12.

Text - Snowbattt • 4h Me. I automate shit all the time at work to make daily routine jobs more easy. I write manuals with screenshots with arrows indicating where to click or where to fill in what. Whenever I write a manual, I assume that whoever reads it is a complete idiot so that whenever customers call for the same questions again, I just send them to the online manual I created. No need to type it out again by email or explain it again by phone. Reply 1 2.1k ...

13.

Text - dirtfishering • 2h I work for a huge company. A huge company. That said, as management are all about 40+, anyone who can use a computer for more than Word and writing a letter is deemed a 'computer geek' (official title) Usually data checking consists of having one excel spreadsheet on one screen, and on a second screen (which has only just become 'a thing') it's a good old Ctrl+F to find the linked data to check. VLOOKUP has literally cut my workload down from a weeks work to ten minutes

14.

Text - agreyjay • 4h At work, I go through parts and apply 2 different kinds or tape and 2 different kinds of weave. I have finally got the rhythm down and now I do each part individually, and apply everything at once. Everyone else goes through an entire order, just applying tape, then goes through it again to do the weave. I asked to use the big table in the back of the shop, and just put all the tape and weave tools there. And do the parts all at once. Normal rate for an 8hr shift is 1200, bu

15.

Text - Sekio-Vias • 4h Well I worked in a Graphics design studio as an intern. They mostly had me practice and do some basic stuff their head designers was to busy to do. One was a real estate add. It had a few basic templates, but it was all kinds of scatterbrained. I would spend 5-10 minutes trying to find the right layer for all the pictures, and had to mess with way too much. So I made copies of the files, and made one for each template. I labeled everything, made it so the images on top of

16.

Text - OpenMindedMantis • 4h My greenhouse's watering system. I would spend an hour per day watering the garden. 30 hours per month. So for $50, I setup a PVC watering system in a few hours. Now I just turn on the spigot and watch while I smoke a joint. Reply 1 2.0k ...

17.

Text - DLS3141 • 3h An older company had a person dedicated to "data entry" which boiled down to copying and pasting portions of data from text files into spreadsheet and formatting into a report. The person originally doing this job spent a full 40+ hours/week doing it, but was not very computer literate. When they retired, the company hired someone with actual skills. The new hire convinced management to let her work remotely after getting up to speed on the job. The first week at home was spe

18.

Text - vero358 • 4h IT is the king of this. We have set up scripts to do tons of tasks for reporting and data manipulation automatically. We have been using one macro program for years that works flawless most of the time. It can recognize windows and screens and you can tell it to do about anything. Its called Macro Express. Way back in the days when Farmville was big on facebook, you had to harvest these fields, and if you found a pineapple field, you could make bank. It was a grid of squares

19.

Text - adhiyodadhi • 3h I was an intern at a large company during one summer back home from college. My work 95% consisted of using SAP, import to Excel, clean data and generate reports (occasionally create some tool someone needed). In the 1st 2 weeks after getting a hang of my responsibilities, writing all the Excel formulas needed, and basically automating 99% of my work, I was chilling. I went from actually working from 9-5 to maybe 1 hour tops a day. Finding, importing, cleaning, and report

20.

Text - Hnetu • 3h A computer algorithm arranged my work driving route. It looked at physical location on a grid without considering roads, rivers, etc. Just direct distance. It was godawful, lots of unnecessary cul-de-sacing, stuck on one-way trips with a ton of deadhead travel back, etc. There was no rhyme or reason, a giant looping circuitous mess that drove past stops, returning to them later, and doubling back everywhere. I spent the first weekend redoing it by hand, specifically to make it

21.

Text - This one is a classic: Late to the party but this one is too good to pass up: I was once on a US military ship, having breakfast in the wardroom (officers lounge) when the Operations Officer (OPS) walks in. This guy was the definition of NOT a morning person; he's still half asleep, bleary eyed... basically a zombie with a bagel. He sits down across from me to eat his bagel and is just barely conscious. My back is to the outboard side of the ship, and the morning sun is blazing in one of

22.

Text - And then, ever so slowly, I realize that that big blazing spot of sun has begun to slide off the zombie's face and onto the wall behind him. After a moment it clears his face and he blinks slowly a few times and the brilliant beauty of what I've just witnessed begins to overwhelm me. By ordering the bridge to adjust the ship's back-and-forth patrol by about 15 degrees, he's changed our course just enough to reposition the sun off of his face. He's literally just redirected thousands of to

23.

Text - He slowly picks up his bagel and for a moment I'm terrified at the thought that his own genius may escape him, that he may never appreciate the epic brilliance of his laziness (since he's not going to wake up for another hour). But between his next bites he pauses, looks at me, and gives me the faintest, sly grin, before returning to gnaw slowly on his zombie bagel. Reply 15 ...

24.

Text - Makokenova • 4h Programming in a nutshell. One of the mantras one of my professors had was that Software Engineers are the laziest people on the planet because they'll try their best to find the quickest, easiest solution to implement difficult solutions and are encouraged to do so. For the most part, he's right. Often times we'll sit on a task for a long time just kinda "testing" or "stewing it over" before presenting a finished product that does exactly what it needs to do as efficientl

25.

Text - KioJonny • 2h When I was in college I had a job at an Italian fast food place with a reputation for it's breadsticks. They came in frozen and needed a bit to thaw, so we'd take a giant 3x4ft aluminum baking sheet, spread them out in a single layer with no spaces and cover it with a plastic bag, then leave it sit in the walk-in overnight. The next day you'd have to get a pair of tongs and move each stick to a new tray, turning them over, then cover the new tray with the bag and let them si

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