Webforms, Webforms, Webforms

I think I’ve mentioned that my job is typically not very challenging.  A lot of the time it is quite boring, though fortunately I get extra projects every so often that are interesting enough to keep things tolerable.  But this week’s extra project has been the worst stuff I’ve had to do there yet.

The company I work for is doing a study on other companies’ response time for webforms: you fill out the webform for a company and then track when and how the responses come from that company.  The concept is good, and the technology to track the responses is pretty cool.  Here’s the really bad part: all the webforms have to be filled out manually.  Thousands of them.  And of course I was one of the lucky people that got the assignment to do it.  So in the past week I have filled out literally hundreds upon hundreds of webforms.  The monotony has been nearly unbearable.  My fingers have started getting stiff from being in the same position for so long copying and pasting, and copying and pasting, and copying and pasting data into the forms.  Fortunately we only have a few hundred to go, so sometime midday tomorrow I’ll be able to stop (I hope).

It turns out that filling these out is starting to warp me.  Today during lunch I needed to fill out a webform for something.  I can’t remember now what it was.  But I realized then that I have developed a pretty strong abhorrence for filling them out.  As soon as I saw the webform I thought, “Nope.  Changed my mind.  It isn’t worth it.  I’m not filling it out.”  And I didn’t.  I might not be able to fill out another webform for months.