It’s alright to admit life and work can bore you to tears

In all fairness, who hasn’t, on occasion, found their life or their work utterly, mind-numbingly boring? Who wouldn’t have willingly stuck needles in their eyes just to inject a bit of a buzz into the monotony?

Good for you if the answer is ‘not me’ – but for those who admit that they’re sometimes bored out of their trees, meet your new role model; Frenchman Frédéric Desnard, who sued his employers….for being bored.

Not just that – he sued them, and walked away with €50,000 in compensation.

Frédéric worked as a manager at a perfume manufacturer at the Paris-based perfume company Interparfum, but he told the court he had been asked to do between 20 and 40 minutes’ work a day in return for his €80,000 annual salary.

For the other 99.9 per cent of the population, that’s a dream job right there, once you could cope with the smell – but Frédéric knew there was more to life than seven solitary hours a day spent twiddling his thumbs.

The 48-year-old used the word ‘placardiser’ to describe what had happened to him; in literal English that means ‘to be put in a cupboard’ – or ‘to be put aside’.

And where others might have claimed they were suffering from burn-out, Frédéric had been destroyed by extreme ‘bore-out’.

To be fair, Frédéric was a man of rare principle; he told the court he was employed as a manager, but was soon relegated to four years of menial tasks which left him ‘depressed and ashamed’.

He gave the court some examples of the type of ‘boring’ jobs he was given, like configuring the CEO's tablet and escorting tradesmen at his boss's home.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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