Filth
I'd never had a data entry job before, and I've never had one since. I thought it would be easy money for the break between the end of school and the start of uni since I can type fast enough, and I'd already tried more manual jobs (just too lazy).

I was offered a job working for South Wales Police hammering out pages and pages of employee medical records that were being transferred from their paper form. It was only a two week job, but it was still money so I accepted.

Over the first week I got to know my degenerate workmates well enough to want to kill all of them. The office was split down the middle with half the staff performing data entry and the others being full-time employees doing things that I wasn't important enough to know. The attitude of the permanent staff towards the temps was just outright rude. Some would just outright refuse to talk to any of us and insisted any questions went through the person in charge of the temps, despite being something as simple as asking where certain office stationary was kept. Every command you were given was hugely patronising. It was like they truly thought they were scientists testing the monkey / typewriter / Shakespeare theory. Any social events, whether going for lunch or a drink after work we were explicitly not invited to.

This alone would have been fine, as I've come across dicks many times before and I was only there for two weeks. The problem was that there's something about the mindless repetition of data entry that just numbed my mind and made me angry all the time. Day in day out I'd just type out lines and lines of information, keeping one eye on the clock constantly and over-analysing every single aspect of my life with no distraction. All the time, the radio would be blaring out some awful Swansea based radio station where the advert jingles outnumbered the songs and the DJs banter just made me sad for the state of humanity. I'd tried light-hearted conversation with workmates, but the only person close enough to hear me talk over the radio was this guy next to me who was about 34, still lived at home and spent his evenings researching trivia for the weekly pub quiz. Every song that came on the radio would be followed by him telling me what it was called, who it was by, the album it was from, and some pointless trivia relating to one of those points. He wouldn't actually answer any questions about himself, and by half-way through the second week, I spent most of my time trying not to scream at him. I've never met anyone so one-dimensional before.

On my last but one day I was given a formal warning for not highlighting each employee on the paper list with my issued highlighter pen after I'd completed adding them to the system. I chose to just tick them off since most of the people there were spending more time lining up their ruler and highlighting each employee than they were actually inputting the data. Apparently, not highlighting the entire name could cause a risk of inputting the wrong information. I worked about 3 times as fast as anyone else there, and my system worked best for me. This utter pointless flexing of their authority was the last straw.

I spent the rest of the afternoon just adding any name I could think of with any disease I could think of whilst highlighting pages and pages of data. Sergeant filth, the police constable with herpes, leprosy and permanent diahorrea... Twatface McGraw, died in 1972 then got the flu 10 years later... Shit Forbrains born last Wednesday with three heads. Got crabs on Thursday... I was highlighting the fucking world! Off to the toilets, graffiti everything with a highlighter, back to my desk, re-highlight some old pages that only had the ticks (you never know). Add a few more police records (interspersed with real ones so if I was caught it wouldn't be so easy to trace all the faulty ones) Barry Thewelshcunt who died of double anal fisting from the Chief Inspectors mother, whilst your dad watched and wanked. After a while, I gave up trying to be coherent and was just typing flange everywhere. At 5pm I left the office as per usual, not really satisfied with my revenge, but no longer caring either way.

As soon as I got home I received a phone call from my recruiter saying that the police had asked me not to come back the next day. I was most worried that I'd be blacklisted by the recruiter, but after telling them what it was like to work there, they told me I wasn't the first to complain about the and they'd still find me employment, but if I'm not happy I should come to them first rather than concocting my own form of revenge. However, I was also told that I can no longer work for the police in any capacity again.

From the first weekend I was reading this at lunchtimes too. It was a present from my brother: bilder4.weltbild.de/kno/3409/3409771z.jpg
( ma0sm, Thu 23 Feb 2006, 16:12, Reply)