This reminds me of the sole draining * job as a "web developer" to turn word documents into HTML. I imagine such a job also exist in science, but instead of Word to HTML you turn paper notes into LaTeX. He could probably make good money helping professors write papers.
* You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.
The best response to having to do dumb work like this is to automate it with regex, bash (and possibly an unzipping tool - aren't word documents zipped xml?) and take the time that people previously gave you to do the task to tweak your scripts and learn things you find interesting. I got through my dumbest student jobs that way, which was almost all of my student jobs.
I got a friend that basically automated his job, the management was not pleased, and forced him to go back to doing it manually ...
He managed to get another job. But figured out he wanted to work with actual software development, and it also seems to be a shortage of software developers. But it was virtually impossible to get a job without a degree or experience. So he's now at age 45 enrolling a five year university program to become an engineer on paper ...
This is so unfortunate, but I'm not surprised. What kind of poor management, when met with an efficiency that could double an employee's output by automating their current job, limits it back to the 50% efficiency? I've met some managers like that...
* You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.