There have been times when I stayed up till 3am doing work, and ended up not doing any work the next day because I was so tired and sleepy. I know, not a good use of my time, but grad school habits die hard.
“Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can’t see me, heh heh - and after that I just sorta space out for about an hour…I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”
-Peter Gibbons
Yep, one of the good things about being self employed. In fact, those days when I just goof off keep me sane. I’ve even come up with a special name for those types of days. I call them “Monday”.
You’re goofing off at the wrong workplace, then.
I’ve ‘goofed off’ for entire months at a time.
If the employer can’t come up with things that need doing, and I’m caught up with things that I myself have noticed need doing, I don’t have any pending tasks; I’m just in a holding pattern supporting end users, waiting for change requests, waiting for bug reports, etc…
I don’t pretend to be busier than I am. You’ll find me browsing the Straight Dope Message Board or reading a book.
Today. In addition to goofing off (reading the paper, reading here, doing jigsaws – thank you to the person in another thread recently who reminded me of what a boredom slayer jigsaws are!), I’ve been organizing files, organizing my e-mail folders, doing misc light housekeeping stuff that really isn’t important, but should probably be done, and drinking excessive amounts of tea, because getting up and going to the break room gives me something to do.
I’m very tempted to take a liquid lunch, then go home for the day.
Not a whole day, by any means. But it does get super-awkward because I’m in an industry where you need to have your time accounted for in 15-min increments. And I’m super-bad at making busywork for myself. So then I feel guilty, even though my boss here is like, it’s my responsibility to find you work to do. But when you submit a timesheet with 1.5 hrs of billable work and then 6 hrs of ‘no work to do!’ you feel like an idiot.
I just remembered a job that I had when I was 21. A friend and I couldn’t find full time summer jobs, so we took grunt work for the local school district. They built a new school and were shuffling classrooms around and our job was to pack everything and move it. It started with a big group of about 20 people ranging from age 16-21 all working together. We would work for an hour, rest for 30 minutes, work for an hour, and keep doing that.
They decided to send 4 of us older guys to a school that is about 20 miles away to move classrooms around over there. We worked faster with less people in the way and didn’t take breaks, so we were done by lunch every day. We found all of the beanbags and other comfortable things in the school and put them in one room and turned the AC down. We would finish our work, take a 1 to 2 hour lunch, then sleep all afternoon. It didn’t bother me, since it was minimum wage and you only got paid once a month and it lagged a month. That first 2 months with no paycheck sucked. I got paid pretty far into the fall semester though.
I just remembered my first real job – outside of potato picking and paper routes. I was working as a front desk clerk at a motel in rural Maine. I think in the 6 months I worked there, I maybe checked in 10 people.
They gave us a TeeVee to look at while we manned the desk. With three whole channels to choose from. I totally got hooked on Days of Our Lives – the cool Days, with Stefano and the dude with the eye-patch…
I had some business in the Toronto area a few years ago - I was there for four days and one of the middle days was completely open. I scheduled a midday call with a minor customer about 60 miles out of town. I figured this meeting and the travel would kill a whole day. I called to confirm on the morning of the meeting, and some virus had taken out about half of the office. The President was home sick and a bunch of the other people I was to meet were either out or about to go home. We cancelled the meeting and I left my phone in my hotel room and spent the eintire day walking up and down Yonge Street.
It was great. Business trips are usually airport-hotel-meeting room-airport types of things, but this one I really got a feel for the place I was in.
Ah yes, the response I received the first time I told a girl I loved her. 
Ok, so it was in third grade. [/trip down memory lane]
I pretty much did nothing when I was a 4-midnight security guard in a suburban office building. I signed a few people out who left after 6:00, let in the cleaning crew, let out the cleaning crew, walked the occasional woman to her car, and spent the rest of the time reading and writing letters. This is pre-internet.
During the period between being told I was laid off from a corporate job and the actual last day in the office there were huge swaths of time spent doing nothing but surfing the net.
Planned systems outages at the bank. I worked in credit systems, which, as you might imagine, was a fairly system-reliant position. Other than local terminal hardware, the only existing physical materials related to my job were 200 miles away. The department still didn’t close, because the SVP in charge was adamant about having warm bodies available to inform people we couldn’t do anything if anyone asked…which no one did, because as dense as some folks there could be, nobody much expected the systems geeks to do anything when the systems were down.
So, we played Heroscape for ten hours.
Good times.
Same here. I worked for a couple of companies who required that every department have at least one person working between Christmas and New Year’s. Nice idea, but our clients generally closed down that week. With only one person on duty, there were no projects to work on, no phone calls to suppliers (they were closed), no phone calls from clients, nothing.
The year I drew the duty, I recall spending one entire day reading a book and another surfing the net.
I used to have a high-paying job that was seasonal. For four months per year there was essentially nothing to do, but our employer wouldn’t lay us off because we would simply go and get jobs at our competitors (where there was also nothing to do) and our employer would have no workers when the season started (There was a severe shortage of workers).
This meant that for four months a year we would come in late, drink coffee for two hours, play floor hockey for another two, and then the boss would just send us home, all the while earning several thousand dollars per month. Good work if you can find it.
There’s a name for that in the construction business around these parts. They call it
“carrying a hammer.” Employee picks up an implement and walks with feigned determination past supervisor. At a certain point, when interest in him has abated, he picks up some other implement and makes his pass once again for the big guy’s approval.
Makes for a very long work day. And why someone would prefer it to working while the clock whizzes along is beyond me. Guess it’s just the principle of the thing - like you’re getting something for nothing, I suppose.
Most of the work I’ve ever done demanded more of my time and effort than I could fit into an eight hour day and I’ve always prefered that to not having enough to do.
I did have a job as a graduate assistant once which eventually evolved into doing absolutely nothing. I was assigned to the head of the department and was to accompany him on out of town excursions to satellite sites. That’s how I read my job description and that’s what I did. All I did.
When it became apparent that I was not interested in anything extracurricular involving “friendly” late evenings I was given a different assignment which was basically sitting in an empty office for the remainder of the quarter which I dutifully did.
My integrity was kept intact and I was paid to be silent apparently.
The grad student who took my place on the road eventually got so angry with the department head when he decided it was time for a replacement that she lit his house on fire. It was all pretty sensational.
I got some extra studying done and was paid for it, Mr. Busyhands found a new university and got a stellar recommendation to accompany him and my fellow student went to the psych ward.
Such was life in a yet-to-be-enlightened age. Have things changed yet?
I first discovered The Straight Dope and SDMB via bored.com when I was working nights in a call center at Lou Pearlman’s biggest scam of all (Transcontinental Talent/The Wilhelmina Scouting Network/Web Style Network).
After about two weeks I had stopped answering the phone completely, and spent my eight hour shifts dicking around on here, watching pirated movies some guy always brought in, throwing paper aeroplanes, and having sex on the smokers’ balcony and in the broom closet and break room with a super-hot blonde who also worked there.
We all got laid off after about three weeks because the FDLE was nosing around and they needed to move everything next door (just like in Boiler Room).
In my 20s I worked at a small club as a doorman. It wasnt the sort of place with many fights. I think there was at least one six month stretch between full out fights. It was quite full most nights, it just wasnt a violent sort of place. 300 people and no fights. I mean, breaking those up… thats pretty much in the job description, right?
I was alloted great latitude in my freedoms. Where the other bouncers were constrained and their start times were dictated, I simply announced when I was arriving the next day. Nobody cocked an eye or bleated any protest. The frequency and length of coffee breaks the others took were monitored, but I sat down whenever I felt like it. They even had a rotational schedule dictating who would stand at the door and who would walk around the club. My name was left off.
If I needed a day off, I simply informed my boss that I wasnt coming the next day(I didnt do it often, I liked being there).
In the half decade I was there nobody told me to do anything, be anywhere at any time, I was never reprimanded nor restricted in activity. Everyone else had assigned duties such as crating empty bottles, cleaning up, stuff like that. Not me.
It gets better though. Occasionally I would tell the manager that I was leaving to go to another club to check it out. Technically this is a no-no, if only for strictly insurance purposes. We weren’t actually supposed to step outside the door, which is where our work place ended.
And that I know the reason why. Its a job with an incredibly high turn over, and I showed up year after year. If I said I was going to be there, I was. I never added to the drama by drinking and fighting(which is probably why I got away with visiting the other places).
It was a sinecure, it was very much on the up and up. I didnt have to dodge any activities, cover my tracks, pretend to work. I just did what I wanted. And they paid me to have fun.
I ran a laboratory where unless something went wrong, I only had three hours work in an 8 hour shift. And I often had to come in for overtime. 13 days in a row, one off, and then right back at it.
I read. The Tin Drum, Lonesome Dove, Confederacy of Dunces … I plowed through a ton of huge wonderful novels. I agree that dicking around makes the day long, but reading didn’t, anxious felt like I was doing something better for myself than surfing bullshit online.
I’m a substitute teacher. On the days I feel like working, I take attendance every 45 minutes, and spend the time in-between reading, surfing the internet, and doing crossword puzzles. If I have a few free periods in a row I go home and eat, walk the dog, or run errands like buying beer. So yeah, I basically goof off an almost an entire day of work every day I work!
About ten years ago, my husband had a job at a place I used to refer to as “the Mafia money-laundering operation”
There was supposed to be a project they were all working on. But the details weren’t finalized. So all the guys they had hired to do the work pretty much sat around all day. Occasionally managers might pop into the central office and say plaintive things like “Well, I know you don’t have any work to do. But can you guys just do some professional develoment or something, rather than playing Diablo 2 all day?” (WoW wasn’t invented then :))
Also - the guys hired to do the work (which wasn’t there) were all contractors. My husband was actually being hired through a contracting agency that hired him from another contracting agency. So the company was paying nearly twice as much per hour for him as he was getting. After the “no work” situation became obvious, he went to the managers offering to let them terminate his contract, since there was clearly nothing for him to do, but they said “no, no, there’ll be work soon”.
Then - BIG SURPRISE - the company went bust.