He did more than that, but painting a wall, or other manual labor that doesn't require concentration, gives time for deep thinking. I'm sure he didn't mind it.

Hillis gives a written account of it. He wanted to do stuff that actually needed to get done; not BS.

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

""" We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we gave him the assignment of analyzing the router. """

Who wouldn't pay to work there?

Even more now, when we can see clearly how ahead of its time the CM's were.