Covering a non-job
Easiest job ever was temporary cover for a guy called John who worked in a large disability-related charity. John's job was in reprographics and he'd worked there for 30+ years - he showed me a lovely anniversary album the staff had made for him during our hand-over.

Now reprographics means copying, and copying - back in the day - was, I presume, a time consuming task. Carbon copies, all kinds of hand-cranked mechanical devices for "automating" the process and so on. It was boring job no doubt, but a proper one.

However we now have these things called photocopiers, that as well as allowing us to produce images of our posteriors, do a pretty good job of copying documents. So over 30 years John's job had gone from quite integral to the organisation to utterly obsolete. But John was near retirement age, and he had the disability that the charity worked on, so they obivously couldn't bring themselves to sack him. Despite the fact that his job now involved having two photocopiers in his 'office' in the basement of the building and doing the photocopying of any of the members of staff who were too lazy to do their own (there were photocopiers all round the rest of the building anyway).

So John was going on holiday. Obviously management thought that it would be insensitive not to get a temp in to cover for him, as it might demonstrate that his job was pointless. So I arrived from the agency to do the photocopying.

However no one told any of the staff this - they knew he was off on holiday and sensibly assumed that the basement office would be empty. When one of them ventured down to the basement to leave John some photocopying 'to do on his return', she was shocked to find a gangly youth sitting at his desk, with headphones on, reading Crime and Punishment.

Length? A week and a day of audio-literary employment bliss.
(annexed, Thu 9 Sep 2010, 13:15, Reply)