Are Hard Jobs Best Left To Lazy People? Here’s Why Some Folks Say Definitely Yes.

It might go against your inclination to agree that lazy people are the ones to trust with the toughest job, but some people say they’re the ones who will find the easiest road to accomplishing them.

And then the rest of us can follow suit.

These people must agree, because they’ve got some real-life examples that just might convince you, too.

They’re always shocked.

I used to have to make two contracts for every person I brought on a traveling training team. I said 2 contracts was stupid and made them into 1, sent it to our lawyers, and they approved it. Still took me too goddamn long to update each contract with different names, pay rates, and dates. Went on r/excel and found out how to make a mailer list and hours of work takes me 10 minutes. I didn’t tell anyone this though so I just take my time.

Then I had to make floor maps for restaurants to send to the company that puts them into our scheduling program. Well all of our restaurants are cookie cutter so I just use paint to piece them together rather than make all of them each time. Im fucken picasso with Microsoft paint.

Then they wanted me to use excel to keep track of training teams. One of my coworkers used Smartsheet and loves to teach people things. So I jump on Smartsheet with her and she shows me around. Way easier and easier publishing it so that people can see the teams but not mess up any info.

Using forms to not have to ask them 30 questions that auto-populate my Smartsheet, sharing it with payroll so they never have to reach out to me, templates on outlook, tons of stuff. I basically took a lot of my job, said Fuuuck that there has to be an easier way, asked on reddit or just googled things, and spend maybe an hour learning something that will save me many hours in the future.

I always tell people to just google things. They say “I don’t know what to google” and I say “whatever your problem is just google it the exact same way you’d say it to me”. Then when they google “excel thing that makes this do that” they are shocked that they find their answer.

SIXTY PERCENT.

I once was a temp at a tiny office on a construction site in around 2003. I was only there for one day while the regular person was on some training.

They sat me down and told me that I just needed to copy all these numbers from one program to another. So I selected them, hit ctrl c and ctrl v. They stared at me.

Turns out about 60% of this woman’s time had been spent manually typing numbers from one place to another.

Too many things trump common sense.

Worked as a cashier during the holiday season back when i was 16. The supermarket was selling drinks by the boxes and at that time, we only had barcode scanners that was at the front of the computer. No gun type scanners existed.

I was lazy and didn’t want to carry boxes up to the scanner. So i politely asked my customers if i could carve out the barcode from their box to scan and keep. Some agreed some didn’t want to but eventually i managed to amass all the barcodes needed. Labelled them and kept them in a file for easy reference.

Apparently some other cashier got green eyed at my “smart” move and complained to the chief cashier who promptly lectured me on (bullshit alert) how its dangerous for me to scan such barcodes as i might scan the wrong things. She told me to throw it all away and carry the boxes like i was meant to. I mean, i was young so i could but the other cashiers were older and some were elderly and needed the customers themselves to help carry the boxes to the scanner. But whatever i guess jealousy trumps common sense.

Awkward yet fulfilling.

Similar story, at an office I visited recently: one staffer’s job required making copies of files and making a few tweaks to the copy. To do this, she’d open each file, copy & paste its content into a new one, reapply the rather complex headers & footers, and save. Dozens of times a day.

I showed her how to CTRL+C/CTRL+V from the folder itself.

She cried.

Hours a day.

I work in a semi-warehouse environment and we have to track where items are at all times. When we move X item from location A to location B we had to type out the to and from locations. We do this hundreds of times a shift.

I went online to a free barcode maker website and spent about 20 minutes making location barcodes.

I save hours a day by scanning barcodes.

Wait for someone to complain.

I work in finance at a large multinational corporation. I feel like a big part of our job is to just stop doing things and wait to see who complains.

If someone complains, we keep doing it, if silence, then we call it a “controlled drop” and put it on our performance review for creating efficiencies.

Problem solved.

A long time ago I was sent to help a team that was designing some analog test equipment. Big problem was when two of the parts were at different temperatures the calibration would go off.

They wanted me to design a circuit to measure the temperatures of the two parts and apply a correction. I solved the problem by putting both parts on the same heat sink so they would be at the same temperature. It worked.

The scream test.

We do the “scream test.” If something sounds useless, looks useless, and smells useless, we reversibly disconnect, hide, or disable it. If someone (rarely) screams, we restore it. Nothing required for safety or compliance, and everything is backed up to offline disk.

Servers have been turned off instead of replaced. They’ll sit for a while then get melted down. I’m sure the big guys do the same thing with entire racks or even data centers.

Saved on gas, too.

I used to deliver beer. I did not like delivering beer. I may have ended up with 30 stops in a day, including deliveries that the customer would call in to our office for.

I used to bring extra beer and blank invoices with me on the truck, to prevent having to drive back to my warehouse to deliver one keg to a place that I was currently across the street from.

7 years later, the driver of that route is still doing that.

Long story short.

I worked in a CNC shop.

There would be a pile of jobs that needed to be done for the month.

Some took days to run while others were generally quick.

The record for jobs done in 1 day was 8.

What I did was looked through all the jobs and organized them by setup.

Meaning…

Every job has a setup time. Can take an hour to get all the tooling together, setting up the cutting table, and setting the part square to the table so the machine can “gauge” where the part is so when I insert the code into the machine it can run flawlessly and drill, mill, tap whatever within a literally hair measurement. For every single job.

Majority of parts use standard tooling. And I have automatic tool changing with 20 pockets.

Long story short I figured out how to line up the jobs so they all have the same setup.

Blew the record out of the water with 30 jobs done in one day.

Saving the company tens of thousands in work hours.

All because I didnt feel like doing all the setups that day.

Drones for the win.

Herding yak with a drone takes the cake for me. They run from it, and oddly fear it. Which is surprising considering they have literally zero aerial predators.

We only did it a few times because it really makes them uneasy, and doesn’t treat them well. But it is very effective and easy, and you can herd them from over 1/2 a mile a way from inside the house. edit: Im really surprised how much this blew up.

Ive never had some many post replies, but Ill try to get around to answering as many questions as possible.

My post history is predominantly yakking off and towerclimbing stuff, so Id suggest going there if youre curious.

The printer did all of the work.

I worked a summer at a mortgage company as an assistant to the underwriters. My only job was printing documents and then hole-punching them to put in folders. They had a super fancy xerox printer that basically did my entire job for me, but the underwriters at this company didn’t know how to click through printer settings to make the machine hole-punch as it was being printed.

I showed them how to do it, and they resisted it suuuuper hard (like they didn’t trust it? Idk). So I got to keep my job, but what was supposed to take me all day literally took me about 20-30 minutes first thing in the morning.

So they started assigning me real tasks, and even offered to keep me on to eventually become an underwriter, too. Because I was “so sharp” (i.e. I knew how to use the very expensive printer they already had).

I was just about to start grad school, so I had to politely decline… but I’m pretty sure they didn’t hire someone to replace me when I left.

Tl;dr: they had a printer that already did my job for me but didn’t know how to use it. I showed them.

They key to the universe.

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 one screw or washer, 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 a few hours.

Two feet at a time.

Maybe not the most impressive story here, but I thought it was a great side-step of effort nonetheless:

Co-worker of mine had to get rid of a smaller junk fiberglass boat with no trailer. Our other co-workers are all telling him how much time and money he’s going to need to spend to get rid of it, and he’s just saying “Oh, is that so?”

He took off one day, and sat down on his lawn with a cooler of beer. That day was garbage day. Inevitably, the trash guys roll up. He hands each of them a cold beer, and says “Hey boys, got $50 for each of you if you help me out real quick.”

They fed the entire 12ft boat into the packer, crushing two feet at a time.

Sometimes they’re happy.

A few years ago my mom was tasked with fixing my grandparent’s toilet while we were visiting for the holidays. The toilet reservoir was constantly filling and running, and thus flooding the bathroom, because the buoy arm wasn’t lifting high enough from the water in the reservoir to switch off the water flow.

My mom (who is normally a very practical person) had been tackling the issue for hours. She was pretty distraught, thinking we would have to order a new buoy arm, maybe even a new sensor, or switch and pull the whole assembly apart to replace everything. She was planning out a trip to Lowes’ and pricing things out when I walked in.

I took one look at it and bent the metal arm the buoy was attached to, down, so the arm had a slight upwards curve. The buoy still reached the same level in the reservoir, but registered on the sensor as ‘higher’ because of the curve in the arm.

Problem solved, Rangers lead the way.

I watched it dawn on her what I had done, and she just looked at me like I had a third eye and said “You little f**king s*%t! I’ve been getting my a$$ kicked by this thing for 4 hours and you fix in in 4 f**king seconds?!”

She was very happy I saved her from more work and spending more money. She calls me “her little toilet engineer” from time to time. I work on Aircraft. It’s mildly demeaning.

Cut the time in half.

I used to process HSA claims, around 10+ years ago. One system we had to use back then was an old as hell terminal program that took four line items per page, that’s it. For a usual claim, no big deal, not to hard to keep track of things over 2 or 3 pages for a longer claim, most fit on one.

However we had the dreaded shoebox claims. This was the person who saved up every receipt all year in a metaphorical shoebox, and sent everything in, once a year, to empty their account. We hated them. Dozens or hundreds of line items totalling thousands of dollars. Just because you only have $500 in your HSA doesn’t mean we get to stop there. If you sent in $4000 in receipts, I gotta account for it all. Totally killed your numbers for the day, and they tracked claims per hour religiously.

The main issue was double checking that everything added up right when you were done entering it, at four items a page it took forever to tally. So, I made an excel sheet. It was laid out so I could enter every single line, then run a macro that would calculate the needed totals, and dump all the text to a text file formatted exactly so I could select four items at a time, and paste them directly into the terminal window from the default starting cursor position, and every field would fill in automatically. Copy, paste, next, copy, paste, next, copy, paste, next… Etc etc. It easily halved my entry times, with way less work. Finding any typos was much easier, I just had to look at one column organized sheet instead of scrolling thru God knows how many pages of terminal text. It was great.

I showed it to my Manager so the rest of my team could use it. She was horrified I would use something like that, as no human was “double checking as they went along”. This despite demonstrable improvements to my error rates on large claims after I started using it. She ordered me to stop using it and forbid anyone in her team from automating any part of their job at all.

I kept using it for all of the two months I stayed there after that. I had some of the highest claim per hour numbers and lowest error rates on her team. I never developed any more tools for them. F**k her.

I mean, I’d say it’s worth a try.

Anything is once.