Drudgery or a laborious job is often called donkey work and the expression alludes to the heavy loads carried by the animal.
During my childhood in the 1950s, donkeys were widely used to carry construction materials, such as mud, gravel or bricks. Owned mostly by potters, a group of donkeys would be seen being herded with loads of mud or fired bricks — 25 bricks to a donkey, neatly stacked in a fabric-woven sack hanging symmetrically covering both sides of the animals, 12 on each side and the 25th brick placed on its back. So, a herd of 10 donkeys would carry 250 bricks from a brick kiln to the destination, the construction site. The owner of the donkey herd would keep making rounds of the kiln till the specified number of bricks, say 2,000, has been delivered.
One could watch a row of donkeys moving along the sidewalks or on mud pathways, carrying brick loads, followed by the herder, carrying his cane to strike any lazy donkey.
Often, a “rebel” donkey would misbehave while carrying bricks, and shake its back until a few bricks would fall off its back, making it lighter for it. This demanded quick action by the herder, who would hurriedly pick up the fallen bricks and reload them on one of the donkeys — not the “rebel” because the herder had no time to discipline it, but on the back of the most docile donkey of the herd, over and above the load of 25 bricks already carried by it.
As time progressed, transportation of construction material was taken over by trucks or vans, but donkeys continue to be deployed to transport construction material in the countryside for convenience, or for logistics, when for instance, bricks are to be delivered at a site located in a narrow lane.
The concept of a sudden reallocation of the part job is followed even in the best of administrative offices. You can observe the “give it to the docile donkey” alternative being applied in offices under duress, when an errant employee slips away from duty suddenly, without having submitted his input, which is awaited eagerly to compile an urgent report. A quick on-the-spot solution for the boss is to call a “docile” colleague and give that part of the job to him, to do it over and above his own job.
And this docile employee is chosen to do all that on urgent basis specifically because he never says no to any additional jobs, even when he knows that the extra job was to have been done by someone else in the office. In return, this docile employee merely gets a smile back from his seniors, for helping them meet their target in the stipulated time.
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