Complicated or weird formatting. If I am confronted with an assignment that requires me to reproduce “as exactly as possible” tables, templates, letterheads, a list of all the lawyers in a firm (complete with their academic credentials and areas of specialization) or of cities where they have an office, irrelevant instructions in tiny type on how precisely to get to the firm’s office using public transport, and similar ephemera, my enthusiasm for the job rapidly wanes.
Handwriting. If it’s a few notes on a page written legibly, that’s not a problem. However, I automatically turn down all jobs that consist of entire pages, or whole paragraphs, of handwriting. Especially in our computer age, huge numbers of people are seemingly incapable of writing legibly – it’s like the entire population has passed through medical school. Even when it’s somewhat readable, I have to devote a lot of time to squinting at the page, holding it up to the light, guessing whether that’s an N or an H, and similar headache-inducing activity.
Pages that have been badly copied. If the text is cut off in such a way that I have to guess what the last word in each line is, that’s one aspirin. If it’s covered in a black or gray film, so that the letters look like distant lights in a fog, that’s another.
Tiny type. Having to scan the document close up with my eyes, like a dog sniffing a floor for crumbs, because it’s printed in tiny type is a particular form of aggravation that I can only bear for a page or two. It’s sometimes possible to blow up the page to make the type bigger, but that also tends to make the words blurrier, thus solving one problem by creating another.
Lots and lots of numbers. What could be easier than reproducing a lot of numbers, you say? But what if you have to type out each of those numbers individually? Not only is it boring and time-consuming, the chance of typos is high, and proofreading all those columns and tables can be a pain.
Any of these challenges makes me long for a cleanly printed, properly typewritten piece of paper. And the above list in no way exhausts the catalogue of potential headache jobs.