Is your job really donkey work?

Mahesh Babu thinks his job is donkey work but it is that job which earns him bread and butter.

Getting better and better at English speaking doesn’t have to be donkey work. It can be interesting, exciting and invigorating. You need to find the right teacher and the right program.

“Donkey work” – that’s the target phrase for this post.

Now, picture a donkey trudging along by the side of the river. A huge bag of dirty clothes is kept on its back. The washer man is close on his heels following him and poking him with his stick if the donkey ever tries to rest for a moment. The river is at quite a distance from the village and he has to travel for hours before the donkey can put his load down.

Now, contrast this against a horse, galloping along in a battlefield with the brave warrior sitting on its back, its mane flowing in the wind. It brings images of excitement and thrill as opposed to the boring drudgery of a donkey’s job.

This is the central idea of the phrase.

Donkey work is something repetitive, boring and usually needs uninteresting hard labor. Something unexciting which needs to be done could be donkey work or some boring, repetitive job may be called donkey work.

Let’s take some examples:

1. Sudhir used to reach office at 7 am and come back late in the night at 9. Even the work was just filing support tickets and doing some documentation work. Very soon, he got fed up with this donkey work.
2. Why does my team always assign the donkey work to me while the other trainee gets the interesting stuff?
3. Sanju resigned his job as a data entry operator because he thought it was donkey work.
4. As an entrepreneur, you may have to do everything from interesting, strategy level stuff to even the donkey work.
5. My job is donkey work, my wife quarrels with me, my kids dont listen to me and my boss shouts at me. It is a dog’s life.