Work, in the way I use it, neither excludes or includes fun. Whether or not my "work" is fun changes from 'assignment' to 'assignment', however it does generally include some activities which I do not consider fun. Luckily, a large part of the non-fun portions of what I do can be automated.
For instance, every time I start a new cherrypy app, there's a bit of stuff that I know I'm going to do - create a certain directory structure, possibly a database/tables, put some files in said directory structure, create a python file for the main app, etc.
This is boring, but can be handled easily by writing a small shell script that accepts a few options. On my machine, I have a few cherrypy apps that are mounted at any given time. When I create a new app, I just use my little script - and if I tell it to, it will open the file that runs the main cherrypy server on my machine, add the import line for the new app, and add the part to the server configuration that mounts it under a specific URL, by default the name of the apps class.
All of the steps handled by the script are generally part of the "work" I need to do, but instead of taking 20 minutes, it takes half a second. Granted, not every boring, menial task can be automated away like this - but a much larger proportion of boring, menial tasks can be than is found in other lines of work.
That's ridiculously self referential. It's not fun because it's something which is defined to exclude fun?
It's not "work", it's "creating value" and there's no rule about creating value requiring laborious, menial, maddening, un-interesting work. Particularly not IT/knowledge/computer-based work.
I don't assume it should be fun, I demand it should be fun. (Well, I don't, but someone else should on my behalf ;)
(Also, I know there must be troughs, it can't be peaks all the time. I'm just in the middle of some frustrating, dull, un-interesting work too)