Could I be the guy on the road construction crew who holds the STOP/SLOW sign for a day? I've wanted to do that ever since I was a kid. I'm good career wise, just want to hold the sign and hang out for a few hours.
That seems like torture (fairly mild, but still somewhere on the torture spectrum): you’re standing in one spot all day so your legs are probably quite stiff, you do as close to nothing as humanly possible; but you can never fully space-out into la la land because you have to maintain some base level of vigilance. I bet that makes 8 hours feel like 16.
I always feel that George Costanza impulse when he got that doorman a chair.
You’re also not really overcoming anything or figuring anything out or working towards achieving any goal. Probably don’t have many interesting stories to tell when you get home.
You are probably lowest on the totem pole with whoever is around. No one really respects you too much because they all have skills and trades and know how to actually do shit. You’re just holding a sign, something Terri Schiavo could have probably pulled off.
You’d probably get death stares from a solid 20-30% of the drivers that pass you since you are a small cog in the machinery that conspired to hold up their day.
I think I would also wonder what people were on their way to do. Maybe they are in the middle of the adventure of a lifetime, meanwhile you’ve got 6 more hours of standing with a sign in front of you.
Sorry for the long post, but as you can see, I’ve put a great deal of thought into this subject for some reason.