Depends on the person and the work as to enjoyment. You know what they say, 'if you love your line of work then you'll never work a day in your life'.
Hell, work as a freelance chemist, that suits me down to the ground. And even any holes that end up burnt or corroded into bits of the backyard at times (I put that down to 'shit happens, but it happens more to my back yard than to most for some quirk of fate making me a spazz destined to end up a freelance chemist'
)
And hell life would be a bit more boring if there wasn't the occasional willy pete fireball that ends up first sterilizing a patch of ground and some radiating spoke-patterns in what used to be grass and soil, and then come months later, the grass is regrown but so super-lushly due to the additional phosphate 'applied' after hydrolysis of the phosphorus pentoxide acid-smog released by the fireball and spitting trails of luminescent, dripping pyrophoric 'oh fuck!' that even months later, after the ground looks normal and there is grass growing on the lawn again where it went up and took off and the outlying collateral damage areas one can still tell where ground zero was, and even where the drips fell, when bits of WP went flying whilst molten and dripping a trail along the way, long after there were even bits of glass that still smoked more than weeks later if picked up with pliers and the surface of the inside face rubbed with a twig or a bit of metal to scratch away any muck that somehow managed to preserve a thin surface layer of WP on the glass. (although that reminds me...I still need to buy myself a new alembic-style retort. I might buy a few of them actually, given what happened to the last one. Or shell out for a fused quartz one with a 24/40 ground glass joint at the back, like the old glass one that died a heroic death, albeit one that involved dying screaming in the middle of a greenish-white glowy incandescent bolt of liquid, acid smoke-billowing flame.)
(yes, admittedly at the time, I did, whilst it was actually happening, think 'hoolee--shiii-IT!!' and 'fuck, I only have one alembic
' but it WAS spectacular to watch, and it certainly made my heart race with more adrenaline than a cardiovascular system is meant to take
Like fireworks, only without a fuse that needs to be lit, and full of a mixture of inert gas and several hundred grams of boiling, refluxing orangey-colored white phosphorus. (although the inert gas was rendered pointless when the alembic suffered a catastrophic failure that caused a crack to propagate round from a fault line or other weak-point and the entirety of both the liquid white phosphorus, the P2 vapor plus a few bits of RP still floating in a slick of molten WP that hadn't converted by the point the distillation went south, and for that matter, pretty much every other cardinal direction on a compass bar hitting me, thanks to protective gear and setup barring the way to having it melt in one side of me and out through the other.]
Although I do my best to avoid them, and such occasions are as rare as I can make them be, its possible for even the best prepared to suffer the same end result as the worst, I don't claim to BE the best, not by far, but I'm far from being the worst either. And some of them, depending on what happens, do have the ability to be visually speaking, and/or auditorily spectacular, and one can in a manner of speaking, still admire a good ol' stygian, abyss-beshitten stench, not because its NICE, but just for the sheer impact it has when it kicks you in the nostrils with a pair of cloven hooves hard enough to send you reeling
More a matter of a stink's talent at being, well, stinking, than actually pleasant to experience. But in its own perverse way, still possible to enjoy a good acrid, and/or fishy or chalcogen-laden reek from hell that manages to make rotting dairy or seafood smell like prize-winning roses. Although I reckon a chemist probably needs a tad of autism in them (and I figure a lot of them likely do, and all the more so for the self-employed or the hobbyist, thats the kind of thing that attracts auties like dimethyl di/trisulfide attracts blowflies [whilst simultaneously repelling everybody else once the concentration exceeds a part per trillion or so in the latter case])
But as far as repetitive, mind-numbingly dull hell-jobs go, I figure an awful lot of it could be automated. You don't need a piece of meat to flip a burger aside from the piece that goes between two slices of cheese and halves of a bread bun. If a robot can laser-cut and spot-weld cars together, and we can work out the trajectory and velocity of an object in outer space accurately enough to land a probe on it (even if that probe did bounce feet out of the intended landing site on contact and suffer some damage, it still transmitted some data back to us) then surely, it cannot be beyond us to build robots that flip burgers and clean toilets and corridors etc.
IMO power generation itself, is probably the main area that human oversight is required, even despite a high level of automation where needed, for safety reasons. Concentrate on that, and have the robots pick the fruit, flip the burgers and clean the shit stains out of the urinals in the dive bars. It'd save a lot of people a lot of work. That could be devoted to both science, art by those so inclined and generally kicking back and doing what we enjoy best. That and of course the artisanal type produce that isn't really amenable to a robot servitor, and hey, people that do that kind of thing are likely, IMO to actually enjoy carrying on such traditions. Its one thing to say, ferment a carbohydrate source and fractionate the methanol off for solvent and fuel uses then fractionate the ethanol from the fusel oils, and determine the concentrations via automated mass spectrometry, but another for somebody to take pride in generations of say, whiskey or ale brewing knowledge handed down a family line, or winemaking, even if I personally can't stand wine or whiskey (although I'll not say no to a good ale/craft beer or unorthodox 'wines' that don't come from grapes, like cherry wine.) But I can't see a robot being ideally suited to developing both a nose (itself easy enough, technologically speaking) AND the wit to use it in such a manner as to produce the ideal beverage that'll get you pissed and taste best doing it. And we'd need to in some ways, limit the participation of AIs in some scientific fields. Because as both common sense and many a sci-fi movie tells us, the last thing we want, and if it were allowed to happen, probably also the last thing we as a species would ever get, other than completely fucked, is a smart AI with any but the most rudimentary ability for self improvement. in any but a completely isolated system with no capacity for the AI to build anything physical for itself or anyone or anything else. Because once that happens, its 'terminator' minus the hero, at least any that don't simply die heroically trying and failing.