Most of these “tester” positions are boring to the point of testing your sanity. Monotony is the state of doing little outside of a simple, repetitive routine and it offers a unique hell to each of its occupants. When one is consumed by tedium, they are compelled to consume it in turn, reshaping themselves to fill their fresh wounds like a reluctant ouroboros. You dip, you walk, you place, you return, you dip, you walk, you place, you return. The shining isn’t far off.
~former apple sauce sampler
fckreddit@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Water testing is incredibly boring, but also an extremely important job. Quality of water available affects everything in society, from top to bottom. But, I get that it is totally monotonous.
toynbee@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That sounds like the kind of thing that could easily, and perhaps should, be automated.
addie@feddit.uk 4 months ago
In which case, the job becomes transferring the bottled samples into sample tubes in trays so that the machine can process them, and usually adding a barcode to each sample tube. The sample tubes need to be kept immaculate as well - some of the things that we test water for, like pesticides, are only present in miniscule concentrations. Might not actually save a great deal of time, and you need to buy and maintain a very expensive automated sampler.
When I used to work in the water industry, we were usually able to get PhD-qualified research chemists to do all this mind-numbing laboratory work. There’s a bit of a surplus of qualified chemists compared to the number of chemist jobs available, so you got absurdly over-qualified people applying for these roles.
way_of_UwU@programming.dev 4 months ago
I did automation work for a sewage treatment center that did regular water testing as part of treatment. Most of these kinds of jobs are automated for the most part. There’s always a human operator present to supervise and to do some small function that is still cheaper to have done manually instead of by machine.
Comment105@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Why do that when you can provide jobs to the needy?
Making people do work is inherently valuable even if it’s unnecessary, monotonous, pointless, soul crushing work, is it not?
fckreddit@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Thing is most of water testing can be automated. There are electronic meters that can measure most important water properties like pH, electrical resistivity, total dissolved solids, turbidity, etc, which only require calibration from time to time. I am not sure why OOP was hired for manually testing water.