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The summer between my junior and senior years of college I worked for West Law. West is the publishing company that puts all those books of legal precedent on Perry Mason's walls.
West was working on an online (dialup-based, which gives you a sense of the timeframe of this) competitor to Lexis-Nexis. If you haven't heard of either of those things, it's because Google fucking ATE them in the following years. But back then, to get online data, you spend megabucks for specialized, dialup-based data repositories, and West wanted to be It for legal matters, given they already owned the market in deadtree format.
So half the office was keyers. They took printed books that West already published, and typed them in. "But wasn't that already done somewhere along the way to making the book itself?", you might ask. Yes, probably. But no matter. We were typing them again.
But that wasn't half of the issue. To properly cite them in court, you needed the page number. That was where the team I was on came in. We paged through these books and through the keyed version from the other side of the office marking page breaks in the online version. Or, even worse, verifying the page breaks that were marked earlier by somebody else.
There were days when literally I'd sit there with a book on my desk, paging through it and page-down-ing my way through a text file, saying "yep" every 30 seconds or so, for 8 hours straight. I'd walk out of there and not have a brain anymore, just a cranium full of pink goo.
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