kicking dead whales down the beach

Synonyms

like kicking dead whales down the beach

A simile for a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularised by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you *could* write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach."

[Jargon File]