Yes, back when I was a machinist, winters could be a bit on the slow side, especially November and December. It got bad enough that we would pull the engines on our cars and blueprint them, do rebuilds, heck, just steam clean the engine compartments for the hell of it. Although one day was rather … startling. A couple of us had just settled into a nice long “inventory” session [nap] in the vault [we kept some fairly large amount of specialty metal that we stored in a locked area one room away from the boiler room and once a month had to inventory it] when the boiler blew up. Ringing ears, a bit of shock … and assorted bumps and bruises and scrapes, we decided to go home after the fire was out and the ambulance crew checked us out. We stopped napping in the vault after that and started napping in my office instead. Made it easier to find us, but we felt a bit safer!
ISTR that nobody in my office did much work on 9/11. We all just sat around watching the TV in the lounge area.
Sounds like a lot of you are describing “working to rule”, and yes, it actually is harder than just regular work.
Been there.
Ive had similar to above in IT where I was hired and trained as an assembler programmer and put into a department with 10 lines of assembler in their entire library and they would’ve got rid of that if they could.
Took ages for them to move me to a department where I could do something more useful. The manager came up to me and said ‘great idea’ when he saw I had a stack of books to read, it was quite surreal.
Other than that the times when Ive found myself not doing much for a day is when I start thinking I need to start finding something new to do. A quiet day is OK occasionally, an empty day can be pretty bad, particularly if you still are supposed to look like you’re doing something.
Otara
In the Army, we called it “E&E or SERE training”, as in “escaping work and evading your superiors”. It’s an art form and a recognized pastime. A lot of the time, your superiors would order you to go “conduct E&E training in the office” or something like that because they had nothing for you to do but didn’t want it to look that way.
Now that I’m a cog in the government machinery, I spend at least 6 hours a day on the Dope. There are days where I do absolutely nothing. Many, many days.
I did that quite a few times way back when I was employed. I’d come in, check email, write some replies, check out code from source control, write a few lines, then go surfing away on the net. At the end of the day I’d check in my changes. Of course that was balanced out by quite a few 80 hour crunch time weeks, so I never felt guilty about it, especially since I found myself way too often waiting on others for their completed code.
Now that I run my own business, I goof off all the time. Of course I don’t get paid when I do it, but I definitely get the needed work done.
Ah yes, reminds me of the tail end of my last job as a supervisor for a mall security department. After years of walking in circles I had finally had enough. And of course being in charge of a shift meant not having my boss around most of the time. So a laptop and a Netflix account later, and my crew of 4 people wouldn’t leave the office for weeks unless a store called wanting something (we’d keep half an eye on the CCTV cameras still).
I’d even tell my boss we were doing this. He’d give me a project to work on that evening and I’d smile and retort with a “Well ok, we’ll try to fit it in, but we have 5 more seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to get through”. He always thought I was joking, and I felt better knowing I could always use the excuse that my boss HAD been informed of the situation.
Ah, good times with low-paid menial labor. Now I work for the government, so the goofing off is mandatory in our union contract.
I don’t consider walking around and talking with customers work though. Nor helping them either, as I do that in stores I don’t even work at.
AT college I had a work study in the library stacks. Huge fricken building with millions of books, including a couple sections that were never used, and had open study pods. The job for us was to grab a rolly-cart of books returned books, take it to the correct floor and re-shelve the books. Each floor also had a couple rolly-carts where people just put books down. They figured it was easier to have them put back by people they payed rather than force everyone to put them back wrongly.
Anyway. I always allways got there first to grab the quietest floor. One day I had emergency homework so I just sat in a pod and did it. At the end of my shift I just rolled the cart in line with the others that needed re-shelving, and clocked out.
After that at least once a week I would just sit in the quiet and read. 
It wasn’t all day though. Max shift a day was 4 hours so they would never have to pay for a lunch break.
What do you want, a medal?
Yup. When I was working for Ye Olde Giant Insurance Company, in a distant outpost of the most dysfunctional IT department of the same, my nominal boss was hundreds of miles away and had no particular use for me. He gave me no work, and so I did none. I would come in late, surf the internet, go out to lunch, take a nap, surf the internet, and go home early. Went on like this for months until I acquired a second boss, who actually made me do stuff – useless stuff, of course, but stuff all the same.
It’s actually very demoralizing. It’s not good for you personally, and it can’t be good for the larger economy.
I was hired as a secretary for a lawyer the day before he and his wife left on a two week vacation. He handed me a key to the building and told me to answer the phone from 8 am to noon and 1 pm to 5 pm. No other duties. Besides my boss, who called once a day to check if anything important had come in, I think I got two phone calls in that two week period.
I am mostly an “emergency response” worker. Days where I don’t have to do anything are actually pretty good for the company I work for. My boss has actually said “I hope you did not have to do anything to earn your pay today” on one occasion.
That said, the days where I get to sit around and do absolutely nothing related to my job are extremely few and far between. Even though I am technically in the business of emergency response, there is a very low threshold for what is considered “emergency” where I work. I almost always end up doing some kind of goofy paperwork, like processing a worker’s comp claim for someone who strained their back.
Back when I was working my job was mostly reactive. If there was nothing happening, I had very little to do.
I did nothing or close to it for weeks at one job. It was a temp assignment at an office that was being closed down, so I was taking on the roles of people as they left. At the end it was just the branch manager and me. I regularly read, napped, smoked every hour and basically whatever else I wanted. But then again, that’s pretty much what everyone was doing at the end.
I was in the hotel business that day. Boy did I work that day. I was so busy trying to get people out of the hotel. Our hotel was next to the John Hancock building so no one wanted to stay. Then all our customers called up cancelling their contracts. Then the regional boss wanted to know how much business we lost and stood to lose, then the H/R director for the area, got into the act with labor reports to see who we could lay off.
That was one busy day for me 
This is the first time I wished the SDMB had a “like” button.
Anyway- yes. I occasionally come into my office on a day I don’t technically have to be in, aiming to get a specific task done. Sometimes, I decide to ignore said task and play on the computer, chat with colleagues or just sit in my office and surf the net. My time is largely my own, so no one cares. It makes up for the metric buttload of work I do on my own time, when I’m technically off contract or taking another “furlough” day.
Oh, yes. Working a desk job on December 24th or the day after Thanksgiving often lent itself to doing no work; there’d be very few coworkers around, and all of the clients’ offices would be closed.
I’d love to trade with some of you for a few days. I work in a hospital blood bank and there’s not a whole lot of “down time”. Even if I do get a few minutes of quiet between emergencies, management has decreed that we are not to check email, read books, do crossword puzzles, or otherwise keep ourselves occupied. Either find some work to do, or stare at a wall, apparently. But after you’ve cleaned up, restocked everything, and asked if anyone else can use your help… what are you supposed to do?
Most of us try and read anyway, when nobody’s looking, but there are spies among us, so it’s risky.
I can’t think of a single day I’ve been able to get away with not working at all. Not even at my retail jobs through college. I think I’m working for the wrong people!
Yes…I’ve had almost a full week of goofing off, though to be fair, that’s pretty much what they expect me to do sometimes
Not to get too much into the nitty gritty of my job, but often times I fill in for other people at different sites. These sites are smaller and have less work to do in general. Depending on the time of year/month, the person I’m filling in for might have actually finished all their scheduled work for that month, which means they only have to take care of random/emergency things that come up. If I fill in for them when there is nothing scheduled to be done, my job is literally just to sit at their desk and answer their phone for a week. If it’s something comes up that can wait for them to get back, I generally am supposed to let them do it, since they know the “right” way to do it according to their site. If it has to be done right away, then I’ll do it, of course, and sometimes I do things that I could let wait for them because I’m just so freakin’ bored.
This week is actually almost one of those weeks…I have some scheduled things to do, but not a lot…