A recent behavioural study on boredom and who experiences it tells us that it has something to do with the human brain’s networking skills. Does that mean that all those people we hear complaining of boredom are actually hapless individuals, who have difficulty paying attention because of their networking problem — and not on Facebook or Twitter?

‘Boring’ is a word that is used pretty loosely nowadays: “Should we go to the new mall?” “No, it’s so boring — it’s just like all the other malls!”

“Should we go for this — or that — movie?” “Boring! Part one was better!”

“How was school?” “Boring!”

Decades ago, we would get a rap on our knuckles if we dared to use the word ‘bored’ anywhere within the hearing of our parents or teachers. We could get away with an occasional ‘damn’– but let the b-word slip through and we were in trouble!

If, however, we persisted, very quickly we would be assigned an unending task like scanning a huge amount of wheat for stones, prior to getting it ground into flour, or plucking the feathers from a bird in preparation for the evening meal — tasks so distasteful to us that we would hurry through them to get back to the thing we had originally and foolishly given the epithet of ‘boring’.

Peeling potatoes or doing the dusting and rearranging of our study table was practically a joy in comparison to what we had been assigned as penance for our sin of using the b-word!

Poor reflection

We were also told that the word ‘boring’ reflected poorly on us and not on what we were doing. “You think I like having my hands in soap suds most of the day?” Sing, compose a poem, dream of the last meeting with a loved one — anything that will make the tasks we didn’t see as satisfying activity move along faster and get done. Someone had to do them, after all, so why not us?

Those raps on our knuckles in our early years were what saw us through a lot of the tedium of our jobs when we grew older. We couldn’t constantly be challenged and charged, could we? There were times when long lists had to be gone through, when statements had to be prepared and tallied and posted off... Let the person on the receiving end find it boring — we were going to take it as a gauntlet to be picked up and raced forward with.

A couple of my choices of profession were also considered boring by many. “How can you bear to sit and tote up numbers?” they asked when I was in a bank, and they figured that sooner or later I would get bored of the figures and search for something more interesting — in their eyes.

But every banker knows that there is much more to the job than mere figures and so, long hours and long years at it had me provoked, stimulated, exhausted, but never ‘bored’.

Much later, when information technology enabled services made transcription into a job option, there were raised eyebrows at those who went into a profession where one tried to figure out what alien voices continents away were intoning. But none of those voices were saying the same thing again and again; there was so much variety, so much to puzzle over, that boredom was the last possible word to describe the job. Painstaking, confusing, jargon ridden, technology dependent, but boring? Not a chance!

So call it ‘routine’, call it ‘mundane’, work on vocabulary and figure out what word is applicable — but leave the b-word out of it!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.