Bored and at work... - Page 2

Michael Scott's evaluation of Jim sums this thread up nicely: "Not a hard worker. I can spend all day on a project and he will finish the same project in a half-an-hour... so that should tell you something."

Can't tell you how many computer/phone/rational thought-illiterate bosses I've had in the past spend days working on something that I could finish in a half hour. Does anyone feel guilty for slacking or surfing? I keep feeling guilty, but then I slowly realize I'm way ahead of my work and continue looking up weird shit on Wikipedia.

Fun timewaster: try to calculate the amount of money earned while on the shitter this year. After work, buy yourself something nice. You've earned it.

Could you be my new best friend? I've never seen anything summed up so quickly and efficiently, and its exactly the problem me and a friendly co-worker run into every single day at work.

I've never once missed a deadline with any editing/shooting projects while with this production company. Yet the two lunkheads in a 'senior' position do everything in their power to complain about our lack of work ethic, specifically because they don't understand how someone could complete work faster than they do. It continues to cause alot of friction over the years at the office here.

I'm usually a week ahead of delivery for the series of commercials we deliver, and am being constantly eyed as a result. Because of that, I've simply drastically slowed down my production, the result being I'm not as suspiciously suspect of 'slacking off'.

The boss is 75 years old and can't operate anything we use for production, and he gets all of his information on the daily operations from a guy without a high school education who see's me and the only other competent co-worker as lazy bums because we're both trained proficiently in shooting and editing.

The episode with that line in it aired when I was working at at an awful job at a law firm. I wanted to stitch it on a sampler and hang it in my cubicle.

We had to run conflict of interest checks through a database. I remember realizing one afternoon that I could complete about twice as many of them as most of my coworkers in a day. That's when I started making little hashmarks on a piece of paper - ten checks per day, no more, no less. It was one more than the average I calculated for my department as a whole.* Any time that remained was mine to do what I wanted. Whenever my boss scolded me, I asked her if there was a problem with my productivity. I think she would have had a breakdown if I hadn't quit when I did.


* - Yeah, I was calculating averages. It was that bad.

Scott's post is absolutely correct. It takes me almost no time to do my work - this is why the bulk of my day is spent surfing the web, because everything's DONE. Seriously - I actually take a task and split it up so that I have something to do the next day. I'll create an expense report in the accounting system one day, and then the next day I'll actually reconcile the receipts - THAT'S how easy and dull my job is. I'd honestly like to see them ever accuse me of "not doing my work" (not that that's happened). Because, really? Let's take a look at my desk - it's nothing but task after task of menial things that are already finished. Thank god for this board and for news sites, or else my brain cells would have dried up and tumbled out of my ears a long time ago.

Ah, good to know I'm not a lazy piece of shit and instead an overly productive piece of shit. Personally, I think it usually has to do with my bosses not being familiar with the toolset I use to complete my tasks. Therefore, when I get shit done early, they're amazed. If I spend all day on it, they feel it's expected. Gotta love computer illiterate people!

I also have the suspicion that a majority of the people I've worked with in the past are slow adults. But that's an entirely different matter.

Do you guys have any "cardinal sin" type activities that you absolutely WILL NOT do at work regardless of how much free time you have?

I am in a position that the work comes in waves, and sometimes I get a lot of downtime all at once between those waves. Case in point: because it's close to Christmas, and they give us a free week of holidays (Dec 25 to Jan 4th I do not have to work nor do I have to burn my own vacation days), there are lots of folk who have already started Christmas Vacation. November I was getting my ass kicked responding to user requests and training people and whatnot, but it was all in preparation of them taking a month-long holiday. Now that everyone is gone, I find myself having exactly nothing to do.

So, I have been spending time teaching myself stuff not related to my job and prepping materials for the course I am teaching in January. You could argue that these are not truly work activities, but they don't seem so bad, right? Today, I committed a cardinal sin and used the morning to catch up on some freelance work. I have no ethical ground to stand on by doing so, but I am officially out of stuff to do, and I have a whole 'nother week of having to be here before I too succumb to winter solstice goodness. I feel sort of rotten about this, but the College's opinion is that they would rather have your ass in a chair than send you home when there is nothing to do.

What, like look at porn? Never!

heh, even if I wanted to do that here I couldn't because of the crazy web filtering system they have at the college. They block all of the ports used by World of Warcraft too, as well as the ability to network game. I think this is mostly done to conserve bandwidth usage by students, but yeah, shitty for me.

So we had our usual sit-down meeting yesterday. Business is still drifting downhill. We were once a bigger production company with a regular huge client who could support us outright, but they kicked the company to the curb a while back. Now the boss has been scraping by for any clientele we can manage to find, I'd join in and help out finding perspective clients, but the two guys in charge here really do treat the staff like crap.

At the meeting, the boss just announced he was giving us a whole two days off for christmas! Be back to work tuesday morning for the week and a half-day on new years eve! There's a guy whose been working here for 25 years with a wife and kids, another one whose been here 13 years with a wife and kids, and another guy whose just really creepy, all of them are getting the same deal.

I'm going in today and telling the boss I can work late to finish my workload for that retarded week of work, because I'm going to be out of the province with my family. He'll probably turn me down and demand I come in that week, at which point I'm telling him I quit. Family and friends I'm lucky to see once a year is more important, wish me luck everyone!