What's something you watched yourself do every single day at a job that you later found out only existed because nobody had ever questioned why they were doing it in the first place?

at my old retail job we had to print out these daily inventory sheets that literally nobody ever looked at, and when i finally asked why we were doing it after like 6 months, turns out the manager's manager's manager had asked for them once in 2015 and nobody ever told them to stop lol

I started at a new company and my manager had me pulling these reports on some support case metrics. Took about 3 hours every Monday to do the work. I got fed up with them and stopped doing them. Boss came up to me one day and asked me where the report was. I told him I didn't do it. He got kind of pissed and told me how critical the report was. "Okay, if that's the case, tell me the last time you looked at it". "Well I know it's been a few weeks but I look at it...". "Two years. I haven't done the report in two years". "".... Okay maybe it's not that valuable"

I had a job where I’d spend a good 30 minutes a day preparing a spreadsheet for my boss that would “get sent to management”. Turns out nobody was even looking at it.

at my old retail job we had to manually write down every single return on a clipboard even though the register already recorded them, and after like 2 years someone finally asked why and turns out nobody knew, it was just something the original manager did in 1998 lol

I always question what I perceived as a waste of time. Most bosses replied, “because that’s what we have always done”. Stupid tasks that wasted time and to me money.

Early on in my job, I was told to email my hours (e.g., 32 regular hours, 8 sick hours) to a certain person every Friday. After doing that for months, I mentioned it in a team meeting and no one else had ever done it, so I guess it was unnecessary. The odd thing was the person I was emailing never asked a question or mentioned it.

I'm a pastry cook and make dough every morning. The way I was taught, you mix the dry ingredients together (salt, flour, sugar, yeast) and then mix the wet ingredients (olive oil, warm water, some more yeast) then you put both in the Hobart (mixer) and blend them. It took me a year until one day I decided to just toss everything in the Hobart without even dirtying a dish, see what happens. The results were the exact same. You know why? Because these people were doing it this way before they bought the Hobart, this is how you do it if you want to mix and knead the dough with your hands.

I used to upload a daily file to a random drive did it everyday for 10 years and then I asked "why?" Turns out nobody knew why. So naturally I stop up loading the file and after a week I get a call from some random IT guy asking why the file wasn't being updated. I asked him what the point of the file was and he also didn't know and to just keep uploading it. I never uploaded for the next 5 years.

https://27bslash6.com/timesheets.html

We kept a weekly tracker of how many referrals we got and how many we closed. Emailed to manager each Friday. Come to find out no one reviewed it, just busywork.

A daily status meeting whose only purpose was to prepare for the weekly status meeting.

Not me but I once interviewed firefighter EMTs for a school project and they told me a story of how they would start each shift watering the wheel wells of the firetrucks and it would eventually make them rust & were expensive to replace. Finally, a consultant came in and asked why they did that & no one knew. It was just a part of what they’d all been trained to do. Turns out the habit was passed down from when firetrucks used to have wooden wheels to prevent them from catching fire and they never stopped even after modern firetrucks came into existence.

My company printed payroll sheets for each week and we signed the sheets. Sometimes we would do it in batches of months worth of sheets. Then the sheets would disappear presumably to be filed away. Turns out they were simply thrown out. We don’t print those any more.

We had an automated process that had been around for about a decade. Absolutely critical to the whole place. Over the years, things had been added here and there, but nothing was ever removed and nobody ever examined what or why it was doing things. I decided to rework it. It was a nightmare. Everybody was afraid that removing seemingly redundant components would have unexpected knock-on effects and f*** everything up. It was better to waste a little bit of time here and there than be the group that caused the calamity. It took about 6 months of running from group head to group head and specialist to specialist to get it fixed. In the end it was 15% faster--95% faster if you excluded the slow processes that couldn't be changed. It was also more robust and maintainable, and easier to understand and troubleshoot. To my quiet surprise, everybody was pleased. So naturally it and everything like it became my responsibility forever. Oops.

We've just started recording the fridge temperature on a clipboard (i work in a cheese making factory in the warehouse) but we have digital monitoring of the temperature on the actual settings for the fridge/warehouse, 2 hand held thermometers in each fridge (there's 2) and they get sent straight to the office and recorded digitally AND we have a technical assistant who takes the temperature manually every 2 days as well as checking the digitally recorded ones 🙈🤷‍♂️. But the QC guy is partially to blame because he 1- can not be arsed to do his job (he's meant to check temps too) and 2. He decided we should do it cos its a record of the temperature... even with the others.. and it should also be his job...

Used to have to do a weekly executive meeting. 30 page slide deck that needed to be updated. Only had a few hours in the morning to get it done. Two slides would take an hour due to the limit of the system. One week I didn't do it. No one said a thing. Didn't do it next week. Again, nothing. Went on for 3 months until someone finally asked about it. Just stopped doing it. 😀

Drinking coffee before even saying good morning to anyone

Standing in a specific spot in the Centauri royal courtyard.