My butler never eats or does any kind of normal activities to entertain himself. All he ever does is make drinks from the globe bar. You would think if he was actually ever properly hungry or bored that he would do other things to fill his needs? Like eat real food? Watch tv, listen to the radio, read, something? Also When he gets tired (which seems to take an abnormally long time) he won't actually sleep. He just keeps getting in and out of bed over and over and over.... He'll just do that for hours if I let him. For now, to fix it, I've used testing cheats to fix his needs and make him happy whenever he starts doing that. Otherwise he'd do that forever and no work would get done around the house.
Also, he won't fix broken things, and when I finally tried to tell him to repair objects, my sim rings the bell to call the butler over, but then the action just cancels out and so I can't tell him to fix things either. I haven't really tried telling him to do anything else yet, other than to invite visitors into the house (which worked), so I don't know what other orders don't work, if any others are broken.