scut work

scut work

Tedious, routine work, especially that which is menial or objectionable. Medical interns always have to do the scut work around the hospital—it's just one of the steps toward becoming a doctor. I worked the whole summer as a laborer for the construction company my friend's father owned, so I got used to all manner of scut work.
See also: scut, work
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • grunt work
  • do the donkey work
  • be (one's) own master
  • be your own master/mistress
  • mistress
  • donkey work
  • be (one's) own mistress
  • be at work
  • it will never fly
  • It'll never fly
References in periodicals archive
He works weekends, consumed by constant demands to do scut work like "put new cover sheets on the TPS reports."
Once it has feelings, will we feet guilty about making it do all the scut work, and start cleaning up before the robot comes in, and apologizing for the mess?
Well, a decade has passed, yet it seems like just yesterday I was doing scut work as an intern.
But don't just delegate scut work. Standard thinking is to delegate those things you hate doing.
As institutions gain experience in instituting systems of care delivery that do not depend upon a single individual being in place for 36 hours at a stretch, and as programs gain experience in developing resident-scheduling strategies that minimize scut work, prevent redundancy, and maximize educational experience both in and out of the operating room, we will begin to see more clearly what 80 hours a week can buy for us in terms of training and patient care.
Soon, we discovered that those long days without rest were molding our psyches into those of surgical robots whose primary responsibilities were providing wound care and surgical assistance, identifying surgical illness, and of course, completing student-oriented surgical scut work with a smile.
If Clancy must farm out the scut work of actually writing, he should have the wit to hire a ghostwriter with a better sense of how to organize a book.
"The biggest challenge, I think, is to get them all to work together," Valdez said of her staff, "[and] to get everyone to pitch in on the research, the clean up, and all the scut work in between Much of it is done by example, and makes the environment as conducive to work as possible."
But in order to justify taking them out of the home they had to say that what they were doing was idiot work, scut work.
In addition to making information about internships available online to bolster recruiting, the company is strengthening its programs so that interns do less scut work and have more opportunities to write page one stories and to understand how a newspaper operates.
Though such research would require a lot of what Freed calls "genetic scut work," the findings could enable scientists to use captive-breeding programs to produce generations of dis- ease-resistant birds, which eventually could be reintroduced into the wild.
Brother Lawrence's daily work did not transform him, she says, instead, "work, even drudgery, / was transformed." To this extent, Brother Lawrence seems more like the artist than the mystic, but Levertov adds, "Your secret was not the craftsman's delight in process, / which doesn't distinguish work from pleasure." Since his daily work itself (which, we remember, was largely scut work in the kitchen) was not the way into the presence of God, but was merely what he did while in the presence, "the Adamic legacy" of labor as a curse was irrelevant.