According to a famous quote by Bill Gates, “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” The idea behind choosing a “lazy” person to do a difficult job is that they will be motivated to find a more efficient way to complete the task, rather than just putting in a lot of effort. A lazy person may be more inclined to look for shortcuts or ways to automate the process, in order to minimize the amount of work they have to do. This can lead to the creation of more efficient processes, tools or procedures that can be used by the entire team or organization.
Here, people share the most innovative, sometimes humorous ways to accomplish tasks quickly and easily. Continue reading to learn more.
At my last job, a truck suspension shop, we did inventory every December and it was someone’s job to count all the washers and screws of every size.
It was my first inventory and I casually mentioned that they should just weigh 10 screws or washers, then weigh them all and divide the weight to get the count. Everyone looked at me like I had given them the key to the universe.
Counting washers and screws went from a day or two, to just an hour.
Not that this is a difficult job just a tedious one.
I worked for a chicken wing restaurant as a cook and at the end of the night, the staff has to break down all the boxes and take out the trash, typical kitchen work, no big deal. Each box needs to be flattened and taken to recycling to save space. What cooks normally do would flatten all the boxes, stack them up high, and then carefully carry the stack about 30 yards to the recycling bin. 9/10 times the stack falls over or a couple of boxes fall off.
Apparently, I was the first guy in the kitchen to save the largest box and put the other flattened boxes inside of the large box for easier carry. Everyone was looking at me dumbfounded like I was a fool. Cut the time to do the job in half
Start of the lockdown, my 9-year-old son was having worksheets emailed to complete at home. One day, left him at the laptop doing his math while I made some dinner with my 3-year-old daughter. Walked into the living room with his dinner to find him asking Alexa all of his math questions.
Worked as a laborer at a nursery one summer. Daily tasks included manually watering 15,000 plants each day. Put together a back-of-the-napkin plan to build an irrigation system and spent the next few weeks building it with some money from the boss. That system is still running 15 years later and does all the work now. I did automate myself out of the job and had to find another eventually.
A couple of years later got my engineering degree. I’m convinced Engineers are inherently lazy people that will spend a disproportionate effort to make things easier.
In my teens, I started working at a local grocery store and was hired in the Deli/Bakery Dept. Every morning 1 person made salads, 2 people brewed the fresh gallon sweet tea and 2 people created/prepped the deli counter ready-to-go meals. One week we had a bad flu case hit us and we were severely short on staff.
I grabbed a grocery cart and started brewing tea. While it brewed I made the salads. Instead of taking each gallon of tea to the other side of the store 1 at a time I would place them in the grocery cart and continue brewing and stacking till the cart was full (Because f*ck walking back and forth). Usually, by the time it was full, I was finished with all morning prep and was able to help the cook make breakfast and prep for lunch. The manager saw this and turned it into my full job in the morning. Unfortunately for my co-workers most were then ‘let go’. I only knew of 1 who was lucky enough to be moved to another job in the store. I ended up leaving shortly after due to the backlash.
I remember reading about a Texas airport that had a high rate of complaints from people who had to wait a long time for their luggage at baggage claim. The solution: Assign a further away Baggage claim for the same flights. People walked longer, but complaints went way down since they didn’t have to wait as long.
Every year in the Canadian winter, powerlines would fail due to the weight of the snow. It took many days to build up enough to break a line so they employed a team to walk the routes and shake the poles to loosen the snow.
One day they saw a bear shaking the poles and realized that if they could get the bear to do it they wouldn’t need to walk the route.
So they gave one guy a bucket of honey and he’d walk the route painting the sides of the poles with honey to attract the bears. It worked for a few more years But this still takes a lot of time to do.
So then they had the idea of flying a helicopter along the route with a trained sniper with honey paintballs that he’d shoot the poles with.
On its maiden flight, the helicopter passed the lines and the downdraft blew away all of the snow.
The flights continue to this day but without the sniper.
I’m not sure this is the exact same thing but something quite similar. I worked at Pizza Hut when I was in high school, from Freshman year all the way up until right after graduation. I was a cook and was very lazy back then. I didn’t do my job badly, in fact, I made a point to be better than every other cook, I’d be done making several pizzas with them in the oven and be on my phone or flirting with the waitresses before other cooks could even lay the pepperoni.
I knew that if you sucked they would push you harder so I made a point to do my job well enough that I didn’t get bothered.
I had a really cool manager for the first 3 and a half years, she would smoke pot with us behind the store and sh*t but then would challenge us to races of pizza making when things got busy. She ended up getting fired over something or other and they transferred in some old lady who had been with the company since the dawn of pizza, she was all about every rule being followed perfectly and took no sh*t. She also didn’t smoke weed so that was lame. She was like the district manager for another district and was on her way to retirement so they gave her our store basically.
At first, she hated me cuz I was a young smart ass and she tried to take away all my shifts that were on the busiest times, but after realizing everyone sucked she finally put me back on Fridays and weekends. Luckily my goal to not be bothered had actually made me an excellent employee I suppose, I followed all the rules before she even tried to tell me.
So a moment I’m actually still proud of today, 10 years later, I was preparing a bunch of pizzas on a morning shift, just getting the dough ready, sauce, and cheese. Then you stack them under the make table in a cooler so when it gets busy you only have to lay toppings, they do this daily. She’s watching me do this for about 30 minutes then out of the blue says,
“You know, when I came here I thought you were lazy because of how little you move, but after watching how much quicker you get things done I can recognize that you’re not lazy, you’re just more efficient.”
It was a very satisfying thing to be told and I feel it helped a lot with my confidence right before graduating high school and going out to get real jobs.
My brother gave my oldest nephew 10 dollars a week if he did all his chores without 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 of a few chores.
We had to hold a thermometer in water in chemistry class. It probably was only a 20-minute experiment but your arms get tired after a couple of minutes and you can’t let the thermometer touch the bottom of the pan or it won’t get an accurate reading. So instead of sucking it up and just holding the thermometer, my lab partner built a contraption out of lab books and paperclips to somehow hold the thermometer in the water without it touching the bottom.
It was the stupidest-looking thing you would ever see in a lab class and our professor even walked over and said “if it looks stupid, sounds stupid, but it works, then it isn’t stupid.” My lab partner and I joke that he wasn’t talking about the contraption but the intellect of my lab partner
I was a (paid) intern at a large company during one summer back home from college.
My work 95% consisted of using SAP, importing to Excel, cleaning data and generating reports (occasionally creating 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 reporting usually took hours but with all the formulas it took 2 minutes of clicking. I then helped the other cool intern get his sh*t set up so we could both just chill. We could take 2-hour lunches (paid for by the company) and nobody said anything cause we were just getting so much more done than the other interns. Of course I helped with special tasks when asked but those were simple 20min tasks building something in Excel.
Overall, was the easiest/stress-less internship of my life.
I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12-pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.
On my first day, I just placed the 12-pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.
When I was in college I had a job at an Italian fast-food place with a reputation for its 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 to 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 sit on racks for a couple of hours before brushing on the garlic butter sauce. This was tedious enough that you’d usually be ready to brush the butter on the first tray as soon as you turned the last tray. I was given this task for the first time one morning and just did not want to deal with it. I realized if I put the second tray upside down on top of the first one then turned it over and took the first tray out, I got exactly the same results. Blew the boss’s mind when I did the 3-hour job in about 15 minutes. I was given a $0.05/hour raise.
I was once set to test a certain piece of equipment on a ship. The test involved attaching the unit to a reader and then running loads of command line commands. Then, one would have to make a copy of all the text, copy it into word and save it as a (really crappy-looking) report. There were HUNDREDS of units, and they needed to be tested several times a year. We did about 20-30 a day. It would take several weeks to finish.
I didn’t know coding at the time, but always wanted to learn it.
Within two months, I had made a program, even with a GUI (to spot faults with ease, instead of having to actually READ the reports). The program could read three units at a time, and would automatically create a smooth pdf report and save it on our server, named with serial number and date.
The job was now to attach three units, then wait for about 3 minutes, detach and attach new ones. Basically, 30 seconds work, 3 minutes break. I could now test all units in a day, though I would typically spread it out over a couple more days.
When I left the company, I left the program on the test computer. I got an email from an ex-colleague a few months later, saying they were using the program on several ships now. There wasn’t any manual for the program, of course, but it was so straightforward that it wasn’t needed.
Worked in a local adult education center. One of my main tasks was to make calculations about how many people enlisted for a course, how many of them got discounts (unemployeds e.g.), how many men/women/age etc. That was needed to calculate upcoming course fees etc. That was my only work there and I hated it.
This was in the early 90s, so PCs were a thing in our offices but I had no idea how to write a program or use a database to use this information. Lucky as I am our center had an interesting policy: when you want to educate yourself, you can attend that class for free. And when it’s during the worktime, then this is work time – as long as my supervisor is ok with that. She was.
So I spent 3 months “studying” database structures, scripting, coding etc. I told my tutor what I wanna do and he helped me to write a script that grabs all the necessary information from the course database, copy that into another database and then I went crazy and wrote code that was insane. I implemented “what if” scenarios thanks to filters. In the end, I was able to do my work, which needed 6hrs a day within 15 minutes. I mean, before that it took e.g. an hour to have all the necessary information to have a “how many unemployed single parent women does it need to make the costs of that course even. I had EVERYTHING back then. Now you want statistics on how many single-parent disabled foreign women at the age of 80-90 are needed for the next 2 years to keep the ornithology course running? Sure, no problem. Clickety-Click, done.
After that, I started the PC in the morning, grabbed all the data, ran my script, was done within 15 mins and then read the book I brought from home. At the end of the day, I gave my supervisor several dozens of papers, statistics, predictions etc and said “That was a lot of work!!” and went home. My supervisor was super happy with me because I did so much more now and was super effective.
Back in high school a lot of kids used to walk thru his park to get home/to school. A portion of the path went into the woods because it was just quicker than walking the actual trail. At one point in the walk through the woods, you had to go up this small but tedious hill; nothing major but it took like 10 seconds of hard work to go up it. You couldn’t go around because one side was a small cliff to the creek below and the other side had dense trees. One summer, a bunch of us got together and decided to just dig through that hill to make it flat. It took like 14 of us 3 good days to get through it.
It was a hard 3 days but it was definitely worth it. Saved 10 seconds of hill climbing every morning and afternoon, 150+ days of the year. And it wasn’t just us, but hundreds of other kids who took the same party every day. Sometimes you need to put in a lot of work so your future selves can enjoy the easy way out.
At work, I go through parts and apply 2 different kinds of 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 the 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. The normal rate for an 8hr shift is 1200, but I can manage 1800 in a day, going at a nice steady pace.
I can get 1800 going at a steady pace. I’ve done it before. But I usually don’t. Most days I go slow and relax, purposely only making 1300-1350 or so parts. It’s just enough over the rate to get my incentive bonus.
And, thanks to being a “hard and fast” worker, the uppers leave me alone at my big table in the back. They look the other way when I have an earbud in one ear, and they don’t notice that I scroll Reddit or read a lot.
I worked in a library scanning incoming books into the system. This required a lot of transferring piles of books from one station to another. My workmate constantly called me lazy because I would not get out of my chair while doing this job. I don’t know how many times I had to explain (a) that’s what wheely chairs are for, and (b) I was at least three times as fast as her at the same job and this was in part because of the efficiency of not getting up out of my chair every two minutes.
Well, I worked in a Graphics design studio as an intern. They mostly had me practice and do some basic stuff their head designers were too busy to do.
One was a real estate ad. 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 and made it so the images on top of each other wouldn’t clip into the lower ones like the previous one did.. so on.. you could be in and out of the template in 2-3 minutes. Showed my boss the difference, and he had this face of “well sh*t..” he said the next day that if I was a graduate he’d hire me because I was better than the people sending applications in.
In short, I made an overly complicated/unorganized thing the opposite, and my boss was actually sad he couldn’t hire me.
I worked for the State doing data entry of a sort – we got scans of forms that people had filled out, and we had to go through and make sure the numbers that the computer had pulled from the scan matched what was written since it wasn’t entirely accurate.
So, the software we used showed us all the scanned documents, and overlaid fields right next to any point where the scanner found numbers, with the number the machine determined written already in the field. the job was essentially looking at each field and making sure the number right next to it was the same – if it wasn’t, fix it. we didn’t f*ck with any of the text, it was just the numbers.
Now, these scans included ALL of the paperwork submitted by each person, including a dozen pages with no data whatsoever, it was just the beginning of the document that the person read before they filled out the actual forms and stuff. there was also a section just after the middle that was several more pages of information for the person.
My trainer showed me how to do all this – he accepted a new document from the queue and pressed the down arrow key to scroll through the beginning section until he got to the first field. he made sure the numbers matched and repeated this process for several minutes, before excusing himself and telling me I could come to grab him if I had any questions.
I sat down at the computer and took a look around the room. literally every screen I could see from where I was sitting, people were actively scrolling. some were using the mouse wheel, and most used the down arrow.
I accepted a new document from the queue, and I pushed the tab button. the program instantly brought me to the first field a dozen pages down. I smirked to myself, compared the field to the written text, and repeated THAT process instead. I did go back and scroll through that first document to ensure I hadn’t missed anything due to a goof in the software or anything like that.
Near the end of my second day, I was called into my boss’s office and asked what I’d been doing the past two days. turns out, as of day two, I was churning through five or six times the amount of documents a day compared to people who’d been working there for years. my boss assumed I was just clicking through new documents without doing any work and was very much acting like he had caught me red-handed.
I asked if they reviewed the documents I finished to ensure that I’d done the work. he replied that they hadn’t, but, it was obviously impossible to go through that many pages in the time it took me to do it. I told him that I knew for a fact that if he went through any of my work, he’d see everything was fine.
he pulled one of my finished documents at random and spent several minutes scrolling through it, shaking his head to himself, staring daggers at the screen. he admitted that this document was fine, but, it would take hours for his assistant manager to review all my work.
“Can I show you something? Could you please pull up another random document of mine?”
he rolled his eyes, but, he did it. I stood up from my chair, came around the desk, and I hit the tab. he was looking at the screen like it was witchcraft, I showed him the field matched, and tabbed my way through the rest of the fields, confirming the rest of the numbers as I did. I finished reviewing the whole document with him in less than a minute.
he asked me if my trainer showed me that. I replied that he hadn’t, but, it was a universal keyboard shortcut that I’d been using since the early 90’s – this happened in 2013, btw.
he just looked at me for a bit, and then said he had to talk to his assistant manager about the whole thing, before asking me to go back to work.
later, I’m heading out at the end of the day when my boss asks me to come over to his office. he fires me for “not taking the job seriously” and “potentially causing delays to taxpayers due to inaccuracies.” I actually laughed at him after he got done with his spiel.
…and that’s the story of how I managed to flummox several state employees with the highly controversial use of the tab button. still blows my mind.
There was a manufacturing plant that made toothpaste. One year for some reason there ended up being an unusually high number of empty boxes being shipped out. So in order to stop that from happening the head of the company hired a couple of engineers to develop a system to catch any empty boxes so they didn’t get shipped with the boxes that actually had the toothpaste tubes in them.
The engineers developed a system that if the box weighed below a certain amount the system would stop and a worker would have to go remove the box and start everything up again. The person in charge loved the idea and implemented it immediately. And right from the get-go, the number of empty boxes shipped dropped to nearly zero.
The head of the company wanted to go see the system in action so he goes and visits the plant one day and notices a huge fan right by the assembly line. Very confused as it wasn’t hot he asked the plant manager why the fan was there. The plant manager said the workers were tired of stopping what they were doing to remove an empty box so they just hooked up a fan to blow the empty boxes off the scale before the system recognized it was empty and shut everything off.
So laziness led to a more efficient (and cost-effective) plan.
I work for the government, and the first few months were training. During that time I wrote a ton of scripts for MS Word to automate chunks of my job. I easily save several hours a week with them. These scripts could literally save tens of millions of dollars a year considering there are 10,000 employees doing the same thing… but I have told a few supervisors about the software and nobody cared.
My brother-in-law spent a whole summer trying to figure out how to fix his sagging deck at the lake which he could in theory crawl under and jack up.
It would have been a tunneling project. It’s a 60×60 area all long 2×6 boards. Massive.
I sat there long enough with enough beers in me to come up with the idea of just cutting a square out of the sagging area about 3ft x 3ft, jacking it up then re-screwing down the boards. He paints the thing every spring with a roller anyhow so it’s not like the square cut shows up.
I used to animate graphics for those LED signs at certain popular fast-food chains. There would sometimes be a library of 80-120 6-second videos that need resized or scaled down.
I figured out how to make a system macro that memorizes some of my mouse clicks and keyboard strokes and it automated a previously 4-hour task into something I could hit one button and start sketching out ideas for other projects.
When I was about 7-10 years old my dad used to pay me to ‘self sit.’ Basically, instead of having to get a babysitter on short notice and then pay them like $100, he told me that I would get $30 if I stayed in my room and didn’t speak to my older sister for 3 hours. He then told my sister that she was the “babysitter” and she would get $30 if nothing bad happened
My girlfriend will kill me for this but f*ck it. I hate taking a finished toilet paper roll downstairs to throw it out. Me just leaving the empty roll in the bathroom annoys the crap out of my girlfriend so I developed this strategy when there were only a few sheets left, I’d start using sheets from a new roll and leave the old roll with sheets still on it. That way, she’d always be the one to finish the roll and have to take the empty one downstairs.
For people asking why I don’t just use the bathroom bin, we recycle our cardboard.
Years ago while working at my uncle’s warehouse there was a monthly shipment of double doors with a frame built in. These doors were so heavy that it was a five to six-man job to get them off the truck and walk them through a narrow enough hallway; this process could kill 2 hours of sales because the place had a crew of ten men and with 6 being needed it was known to avoid shopping there on those days.
Have no idea how long they did this but on the second shipment when I started; I got one of those rolling boards that mechanics use to go under cars and told the guys to place it on top.
I turned a 6-man job with 2 hours into a 2-man job that took 30 mins.
I didn’t want to send hundreds of contracts to people so I did the bulk upload function on this e-signature provider. Signatures came back quickly and people were amazed by the turnaround time. A former colleague took credit for the lazy work I did, however. I already didn’t like that *sshole and it made me despise him even more.
Had a situation at work where I had to sift through thousands of pages of PDFs to find these certain “purchase orders” that some other employees had been ignoring for years when they should have been sending them to people to process. They wanted me to go through everything manually and pull them out.
Instead of doing it manually, one Saturday I went into the office, logged into 3 or 4 of our machines, and had them run adobe text recognition on everything over the weekend. Next Monday, I was able to ctrl-F and find all of them that we were missing.
Not exactly lazy but I ran a little scam on my wife for the first 2 years or so of our relationship.
At the time she worked an early shift in her job on Tuesdays and Thursdays which meant she was up at 5 am on those days. I had an app on my phone that would automatically send a pre-written text message to her phone at 05:09. Usually something along the lines of “just woke up, thought I’d text to let you know I’m thinking of you” or variations of the same thing. Whatever you want to send, just type it into the app, select the date/time and bingo!
Dude, she loved those texts and would tell her family/friends/colleagues about them. It made her feel so special…..until one night we got wasted in Vegas and I blurted out the text message dealio I was running.
Ere, not everything that happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
My boss put my name in for leading a project group shortly after I joined the company. I had no experience whatsoever in project management yet he still demanded that I lead the group of 12 people.
All way smarter guys (tech background and sh*t, these guys are like magicians for me) and with way more time at the company.
I’m a business guy who’s too dumb for balance sheets that’s why I’m in HR (and because I quite like the field the most).
So we started the first meeting, I asked for everyone’s plan, experience and ideas, gathered the different pros and cons, cross-checked with the budget we had, put on a time frame with milestones to reach (around 6 months), put in valuable people to consult at different steps. Why did I do that? Because I like organizing stuff and keeping everyone on the same page and delegating to-dos.
Got promoted because of the success of the project.
I asked my boss why he put me in for it since I have never done anything like that. He said because I complained in the first week that most of the work has way too wonky structure, and no clear guidelines and this could be improved heavily if we just take some time into it. And because I hated talking to others if I had questions and I wouldn’t get a clear answer (like: ask 10 people the same question and you get 15 different answers). In the long run, this would make us way more efficient and keeps everyone on the same page.
At work (doctor’s office) we got a new charting system just as COVID hit. Needless to say, even the people who are supposed to be the “super users” don’t know what they’re doing.
My lead is trying to find me all of the patients who have a certain chronic condition and gives me a list she pulled from our old charting system. The problem is that I need to call people who haven’t been in the office in 3 months and the data is 6 months old. I asked her why she didn’t just pull the registry from the new system and she says there was no way to do it. We’ll just have to go through each patient individually to see when the last time they were in.
It took me all of 10 minutes to figure out how to pull a registry, sort by last visit, and sort by the payor.
She said she still wanted me to use the only list because “we can’t trust the data from the registries”. So I did a little excel magic and compared them that way and got the job done in about 1/2 the time. She praised me for being so accurate and efficient during my 1:1. I didn’t tell her what I did. She still thinks I did it her way.
My motto is “I’m going to do it my way and beg forgiveness later”.
My wife and I have a chore list. I now am tasked with vacuuming which she gloated about not having to do because it is so time-consuming. I bought a Roomba and now the house is cleaner than ever and all I have to do is press a button on my phone.
I believe I was in the 6th grade (2004) & I learned that in Texas, passing the TAKS test was all that I needed to go on to the next grade. All the homework, class assignments, and 8 hours of school were pointless to me so I did none of it. My class grade was 27/100. Laughing stock of my class cause I knew it wasn’t required.
Come to next school year all my classmates were confused about how I’m still with them when I failed absolutely everything. Kept it as my little secret until I got to 9th grade where credits were needed to pass.
I knew a guy who used to work at the Post Office in a major US city. He told me that his entire job was to enter data into a computer program, then that program turned that data into an info-graphic that he printed out and posted every day. He told me once he figured it out it took about half an hour.
He started showing up at work a little early, getting a coffee, and walking around for an hour to make sure people saw him at the office. He would then sneak out the back door – run across town and intern for a company he actually wanted to work for. He would leave the other company at 4:00, head back to the post office, do his actual job, and print out the info-graphic and post it around 4:45.
He eventually got caught because he wasn’t taking his lunch break. When they asked what was happening he claimed to just be working through lunch. They thanked him for his dedication but asked him politely to take his break in the future. He ended up quitting a few months later to work for the company he actually wanted to work for.
So a company I worked for some years ago launched a new product. There was a very significant prize to the sales team that sold the most of this product. It cost approx $100 dollars at the time. I simply bumped the price of every product we had by $100 and gave the new product to every customer as a thank you. No one was the wiser, and smashed the competition by a massive margin.
My math teacher had us calculate the area of the room using the floor tiles (which were each one foot square). Instead of walk the whole length of the room to count the squares, I realized that the room was divided into nine parts with pillars.
I figured the area of one section and multiplied by nine.
My teacher asked why I was still sitting when everyone else was walking the room. I explained it and he said “wow that was genius.” No dude, I’m just lazy.
I used to receive an email containing a copy of the paperwork for every shipment that went out from our fulfillment site. If I opened it in my email and printed it, it would’ve wasted most of my day dealing with all the emails.
I setup my email to forward all attachments to a folder on my cloud drive. Once it was in that folder, I ran a script daily that retitled the files with the date received, converted the files to be searchable pdfs, then pulled out the order numbers and added them to the title. Then it would grab all the new documents and join them into one pdf and send only the page I wanted of each to the printer. Each set of paperwork had 4 pages but I only wanted the first one.
When I was in college, I waited way too long to apply for internships. Eventually, all that was left was an internship at my local PBS station, and they didn’t have any physical space for me, so I telecommuted.
The director was new to public television, and was looking for new non-profits to apply to for grant money. My summer-long internship project was to generate a list of organizations to apply to.
My first day, I did a google search, and found a common grant application form, which included a list of the 80+ organizations that accepted that form.
I emailed her 10 names a week for the next 8 weeks and received 3 college credits for approximately 10 minutes of work.
I worked as a lifeguard. At close there would always be a bunch of toys and goggles on the bottom of the pool we’d have to fish out with the net. When I closed, I always made sure to ask the last kids out to help me get the toys. It made them feel special for getting to help out with my job and I didn’t have to fish out the toys myself.
