Gofer
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Gofer may also refer to a junior member of an organisation who generally receive the most vexing and thankless work. Law firms with a top-heavy management structure, having not enough junior lawyers to take care of menial yet necessary tasks, can be referred to as having "too many
Etymology
Gofer derives from “go for” and typifies a boss’s often impromptu order to an underling, usually a menial one, to go and fetch something, frequently of a personal nature, such as coffee,
In popular culture
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In the first season (1976) of the television series The Muppet Show, Scooter was given the stage manager job because his uncle owned the theater where the Muppets performed. The pun was that a gopher not only is an animal, like the Muppets supposedly are, but is a fast animal, collecting food and delivering it somewhere else. At some point in the Muppets series, Kermit the Frog suggested that he himself was a gofer, but probably didn't last long in the job.
The 2008 film WALL-E features a robotic gofer (named GO-4, a pun on gofer), who is the henchman of the villainous AI autopilot AUTO.
Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth is a gofer for Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
References
- ISBN 0-240-80336-1.