Most tedious assignment EVER

Taking dictation over the phone of the state HS track championships. Every event. From a guy whose voice was as grating as fingernails on a blackboard. Also couldn't spell well. Also couldn't read his own writing well. Took two and a half hours.

Since then, my entire career has been better by comparison.

 

You work with cross county agate? More power to you, but I hope I never have to do that!

 

Mine is/was typing in the wrestling brackets for the state tournament. Five classes, 13 or so weights per class. Ugh.

 

At a previous job ... Bowling scores. Weeks upon weeks upon weeks of bowling scores.

We would get reams of printouts from the score computer, which, naturally, had no disk drive or anything to save them to so they had to be manually transcribed.

I finally bitched loud enough that it was taking away from our other duties that our ME got the intern to do the dirty work.

 

I had to interview JDV for a "scoop" about Mark McGwire!

 

Typing in data for a genital wart study into an MS access database for a health care research project...

Typing in the data paid well and I got to go to Vancouver and London for the study, but you wondered when their portals -- male and female -- were going to close forever

 

Sirs, Madames,

1988 ... I got some nice change for writing 104 one-minute this-Winter-Olympic-moment spots. Seemed like a good idea at the time. By No. 80 I was stretching ("John Schmutz forgot to bring socks to the Winter Games") and by No 100 it was ridiculous. But the crusher came in the recording. I had to be on hand in case we needed two seconds to fill or cut. Okay. But the readers were two dim-witted, marble-mouthed former Olympic downhillers. Twenty, thirty takes were not unusual. I went out to lunch one time and had a couple of beers only to return 90 minutes later to discover that said ski bum had kept missing verbal gates on the same spot. I suggested that we try a different wax on his tongue. Laugh/cry, it was all of that.

YHS, etc

 

At first job had to input youth baseball and softball results as one-sentence recaps. The three of us who alternated this task would send messages to the others via the first letter of the first verb in each recap. Nothing vulgar. But it was a great way to pass the time while doing this.

 

Running, swimming, drag racing, even soccer. I've done it all.

 

I used to write for a trade mag that hired me while I was in college. I had a lot of great coverage ideas, including a feature where we compared import and export numbers provided by the Department of Commerce. Essentially, I wanted to compare the 2001 numbers to the numbers for 2002 and so forth. But I just wanted to do it once, or maybe once per year. Instead, I wrote the same story every month for more than three years. The magazine was about brushes, and one of the imports was horsehair that is used in paintbrushes. So I would sit and tap out about four to six paragraphs of analysis on the import trends of horsehair. There were tons of similar categories, but the damned graphic artist, my friend, used to pester me about my expert knowledge of the horsehair trade.

 

In my second job -- and understand, I was the NFL beat writer, traveled with the team, everything -- I also did desk and night work. One thing I or the main college guy had to do every day was both dog and jai-alai results. Sometimes both matinee and nights. Every day, except the rare dark days (and since dogs rotated among three tracks year-round, there were very few of those).

 

Sirs, Madames,

Trade mags are surely the worst holes to fall into--I dated an editor of several of these rags who told me, proudly, about paying 5 cents a word and having starving writers under her thumb. (Date over!) I had a friend who took a job out of school with the dullest sounding trade mag ever (drum roll):

CANADIAN SAFETY

Ostensibly about workplace safety issues of the mag were dropped in industrial/factory lunchroom like plane-launched leaflets into the enemy's trenches. My friend came to realize that no one was reading it--not even his boss. So he used to have fun putting stuff in that played on the absurdity of his job. He would interview anybody who interested him and tried to find a safety connection to justify the story. For instance, he interviewed a Toronto Argonaut lineman (Dan Ferrone, for those of you who care) and one of the breakers was:

"Helmets a Necessity"

YHS, etc