What's the worst thing a boss has ever asked you to do for your job?
Richard Muller
, Prof Physics, UC Berkeley,author "Now, The Physics of Time" (Norton, 2016)
157.6k Views
Look busy.
It was summer, I was in high school, and I had a summer job as a
busboy
. My job is to clean the tables, sweep the floors, take out the trash. If I finished, just pretend to be doing the same thing. Customers don't like seeing employees
idle
.
I would have liked to chat with the other employees or to talk to the customers. No. That looks unprofessional. Just look busy.
It reminded me of the Disney film
Cinderella
, in which Cinderella has finished her tasks, and her stepmother says, "Then do it again."
It helped me understand why
solitary confinement
is the worst punishment for prisoners. Boredom is worse than pain.
Of course, for many years (decades) now I have not had a boss. That's a fortunate position for a
tenured
professor; even our
nominal
bosses know they can't really tell us what to do.
I think I am pretty lucky that this
trivial
problem is the worst a boss had done to me, compared to the other answers I read for this question.
