I doubt that there is an authoritative history of boredom in the workplace but anyone making an educated guess would probably point to the factory and the division of labour as the point where large-scale workplace boredom became a serious problem. For those looking for a movie depiction of the problem of machine/man interaction need look no further than Chaplinâ??s film modern times where the character Chaplin plays attempts to keep pace with the inhuman rhythm of the machine.
When stuck in boredom many workers attempt to relieve the monotony in different ways. By searching code we can now see that bored and frustrated coders suffer from the same industrialised worker phenomena of boredom.
The results? Strange messages in the computer code. By using the search function in koders.com we can find lots of messages from programmers venting their frustrations by writing small messages. Here is an example:
ptr = buffer;
/* This f*cking sh*t is still giving problems downloading
* the f*cking images through the motherf*cker http, the only
* code we share with the other s*cking implementation is
* the code that follows, so I guess this is the damn sh*t that’s
or how aboutâ?¦
// I REALLY hate this kind of SHIT!
// yes I know MYSQL can be switched to ANSI bla bla but
// it is obviously not the default…
Nice to see that despite our developments we basically remain the same – humans dislike boredom and handle frustration badly…
(via TheRegister)