By this I mean come to work, punch in and do no work. I don’t mean stare into space, but do no work that was actually related to the job you had.
Let’s say you come in, sit down, play on the Internet, talk to your co-workers, play a game of solitare, walk around pretending to be busy, then come back and talk to your mother on the phone, then…Well you get the idea.
One thing for the purpose of this thread I don’t count days AFTER you gave your notice to quit.
I can say I don’t think I’ve ever goofed off at work all day. I’ve always done some work. But I have goofed off a whole day after I gave my two weeks notice.
The Dollar General I was working at had a big inspection coming up, one would decide whether the store got shut down or stayed open. The entire crew worked for 14 days, from 5 am to 10pm each day, getting the store ready. By the time we were done, it looked like a completely different store.
The day of inspection finally arrived, and my boss had me come in from open until whenever the inspection ended, just to show she had an employee on the floor to help customers. Since we had been so busy, there was no stock to put up, no shelves to clean, no merchandise to pull forward, nothing to do. So I spent that day walking around talking to customers all day.
But never in the way that my father’s former coworker did. Apparently this guy would come into work, pull out a set of blueprints, and look at each one for a set amount of time, say 53 minutes or whatever, then look at the next one. When he got to the last one, he’d put them away then go home. He did that for something like 20 years. It wasn’t until someone got curious about his job description that he got fired.
Makes me wonder what his annual reviews were like, though.
It’s happened, but it’s very rare. I feel guilty if I’m not working when I’m at work. I don’t have to be working my hardest all the time, but I generally do have to be doing work-related stuff.
You may think you weren’t working, but the joke’s on you. Just being visible and interacting with customers reduces shoplifting and shrink, because customers know you are aware of their presence. It also makes the visit pleasant for shoppers so they’re more likely to come back. It also makes you available to help them find things, identify and fill holes on the shelves, and relieve the cashier when they have to take a break.
Unless, there were absolutely no customers that day. In which case they should probably close the store anyway.
I have when I worked for the University.
However, that was a long time ago.
I don’t think my work ethic would allow me to do so now.
Or my work load for that matter.
There was this guy who worked at an open pit mine my dad worked at. He spent the day walking around with a screwdriver in his hand. None of the foremen ever bothered him because they figured he was either on his way to do something, or was on his way back from doing something. No one really knows how many days he got away with doing that, but apparently it was a considerable number.
When I lived in SF, I had a really busy temp job that I really liked. When the position went full time I interviewed for it, and I was told I did really well. Then they hired from within and made me an admin asst instead. In that job, I checked the calendars of two VPs, accepted the meetings that were available and declined the ones that weren’t. After that (which took me until approximately 5 minutes after I arrived) I goofed off all day, every day.
That’s when I found the Dope.
It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The goofing off … not the Dope.
At my current job, I was hired about nine months before I realistically should’ve been. I spent about a month or so evaluating the software package I use… and then waited another eight months for the company actually purchase the software and then hire a programmer who could make the necessary modifications to the software.
Eight months… of doing nothing all day long. Eight freakin’ months.
Once or twice a year. Usually to use the tools and resources at work to do things for clubs or organizations I belong to. On the office computer and mainframe.
My wife once left a job because she was told to do that one too many times. They wanted her handy but didn’t really generate enough work so mostly she was paid to sit at her desk, read, and listen to the radio. Bored the Hell out of her.
In my youth, I used to be all gung-ho and fired up about programming. Then I got into the corporate grind, and learned better.
They way I figure it, I’m being paid to do a job. Regardless of the amount of hours it took. It’s not my fault you overestimated the project, and I finished 3 days ago.
It’s also not my job to make sure I’m busy 100% of the time. If my boss hasn’t a clue that I’m spending 3 hours a day on the Dope, then that’s a sign of a crappy boss.
Also, if my boss has no idea that for the past 20 years I go home for lunch and smoke a fatty then good for me too. I can still do my job to glowing annual reviews, and I put in about 1/3 as much work as everyone else. I’m just more efficient with my time.
Sometimes there can be several months between contracts at my government job. Until recently, I had spent 8 months doing the daily roster and then killing 9 hours a day. You run out of stuff to look for online after awhile.
Once when I worked at a golf course as a teenager a torrential rainstorm hit just as I was dropped off for work. A significant portion of the course was underwater as the rain kept chucking down for hours on end, and not a single golfer dared go out on the course all morning.
But since some golfers were showing up anyway (you have to understand the mindset of the golfer…even if it rained for 40 days and 40 nights they’d still be thinking the course would be playable any minute now), the pro refused to officially close the place. So there was absolutely nothing to do other than sit in the caddyshack listening to the radio. The only exit to the shack was out into the rain, and I wasn’t going out there, because the pro shop was only ten feet away and the rain was so hard I couldn’t even see it.
I’ve had some slow days where I got literally no work done. Just goofed around on the internet and made phone calls. Usually I try to get something done though if only because there’s only so much goof-off-interneting I can take.
I once worked a retail job where it was decided that we’d be open for Independence Day. In a six hour shift we had zero customers and I spent it sitting on some shopping carts, talking to the one cashier who was stuck there with me.
Yeah. I did it for two days straight once when I was pissed off at some ruling my boss had made. I can’t remember what exactly it was, but I was in a position that as long as my work got done in the long run, what I was doing on a daily basis wasn’t really managed by anyone. So I fucked around for a couple days before I gave in because I was in danger of getting behind on my workload.
More times than I’d like to admit. I’ve worked around the clock to achieve tactical goals for my employer , but when there is no urgency or benefit to be or appear busy, I relax and bullshit. I’ve quit several managerial jobs out of simple boredom because I was no longer needed to tune up my staff.
But slacking because I was pissed off at my employer? Never occured to me.
Yes, and I hate it. It consulting they call it being “on the beach”. When you dont have any clients to work on, you just sit around goofing off and trying to keep busy.
At one corporate job I had, I didn’t have a boss for 3 months. They had laid off half the company including the 2 layers of management above me. One day I litterally came to work hungover and slept in an olde boss’s abandoned office for 3 hours.