I don't have anything that can top some of these!
Since I've always been an excellent typist, most of my menial jobs consisted of sitting in front of a typewriter or computer screen all day. The temp job I have now is as "Transaction Processor." Music stores all over the country are now renting out instruments to schoolkids. They write up the order sheets, send them in, and because it's the beginning of the school year, the company hires temps to come in and enter all of these order sheets into the system. They have to be counted, batched, scanned, checked, and the information entered into the system.
There are THOUSANDS of them! Tens of thousands! So that's what I do nine and ten hours a day. I sit there and type in orders as fast as I can. My vision gets blurry. My right hand aches from 10-key entering. And for some reason they keep it so cold in there that even with a jacket on my hands get stiff from being so cold.
And all for $9 an hour. As a tech writer, I'm used to getting several times that, but there are no jobs for tech writers any more.
I once worked as a switchboard operator in Chicago for the Chicago Housing Authority, which oversees all of the housing projects for the Chicago metro area. They had one switchboard operator--me. And this was the winter when the elevators and heat went out in the projects all over the city.
So of course all the tenants called me, screaming and cussing. All I could do was transfer them to other departments. I remember one woman screaming at me, "I don't want you to transfer me nowhere! YOU come down here and YOU fix my @#%$ effing elevator!"
I felt for them. I really did. But I was just a poor temp switchboard operator. There was nothing I could do.
I have never accepted a job as a switchboard operator since.