I have 2 kinds of days. The first and most common is the slow day. I’m a software developer and make small enhancements to existing projects and put out little fires that come up. All in all, I bet I only actually work for 4 hours. The rest is web browsing, personal emails and IMs, etc.
The other kind of day is HOLY SHIT THE SERVER WENT DOWN AND NOTHING WORKS!!! PEOPLE ARE LOSING MONEY!!! and I go into balls-out mode fixing the problem. These days are usually 8+ hours of hard. . .
During the busy season (Nov.-Jan), I work 8-8.5 hours a day. During the slow season (the rest of the year), I probably work about 2 or 3 hours. I spend the other 6 here, e-mailing my mother and begging my co-workers for work. I changed departments because of the slow season. Now, I find that the new product line is just as bad.
This is why I’m trying to find a new job. I’m thinking of getting out of the office and going to Home Depot or something like that. The people I know who work there are never bored.
I work in a retail environment, so while the amount of work I have to do varies depending on whether I’m out working with the customers or behind the counter working on copy jobs, I have no choice but to do SOMETHING for my full eight hours. If I’m out front, I spend the whole day alternating between helping people use the copy machines and cleaning the store. If I’m in back, I spend the whole day pumping out copy jobs. The only exception to this is on the weekend, when we usually don’t have that many jobs to run; then I spend about four hours actually working, in aggregate, and the rest of the time I sit around and bullshit with the other person working the shift, waiting for customers to show up.
Right now, I get up about 730 and spend until 1030 getting a small breakfast and cleaning the kitchen and bathroom, and crack open my email and fire up netscape and read some boards online. 1030 to 1130 I do a session of guiding on everquest [so I can say that I do customer service from my home, it doesnt pay other than a free playing account for the game, but it is ‘employment’] then 1130 until 1230 I get a small nuncheon and clean the bedroom. I will also read some boards and throw in a load of laundry. 1230 to 130 I do another guide shift. 130 to 330 I play eq on my playing accounts. 330 to 6 I clean the living room, anything else that needs doing, and email/surf the net and get any bills/resumes ready for the next days outgoing mail. I generally will start some slowcooking dinner for mrAru, and log into EQ and play and watch tv until he gets home at 1030, we do dinner and relax and generally go to bed about 1230.
I generally will put in at least one resume or application for a job, and call at least 1 company a day to follow up. Sucks that there are no real jobs near me [cant be on my feet so that lets out retail, food service and mall jobs] and I am either drastically underqualified or <boggle> overqualified for the positions I put in for=(
[brief hijack]
I have a friend who works at Home Depot. She has a masters degree in architecture, but she said that, after interning then working full-time at an architecture firm, she actually prefers to work at Home Depot. She says she likes the people she works with, enjoys answering customers’ questions, and gets good benefits. She works in the paints section.
[/brief hijack]
As far as how many hours I work, I think I would probably average about 6-7 solid working hours on the weekdays, and 3-4 on weekends. Some days are more packed than others. It depends upon what sort of response I get to my writing - since I just started my own business, I usually spend more time researching companies to target in order to drum up business. The actual writing is the easy part.
Actually, since you asked, one of our client’s websites went down. I’m not going to tell you who it was but if I did, you’d recognize it. Almost as bad as. . . www.babiesrus.com going down. When you pulled up www.whateverthecompanywas.com it wasn’t just a 404 or something, it was “SQL Server Not Found!!!” in big red letters and the thread dump. Oops. Turned out to be some network problem though, not me :D.
:yawn: I think I’ll go get some work done now. . .
During the summer, my days are a lot like Aesiron’s. Of course, squeezing in time posting here is exhausting, so I need lots of naps.
And I ferry the kids back and forth to their camps and the pool. It’s tough sitting at the pool with a good book and a tall iced tea.
Life is hard, I tell ya.
During the school year, I work three days a week, from 8:45 till about 12:30 teaching preschool. On Fridays, I do an extended day that goes till 2:30.
That doesn’t include prep time at home.
When I’m in the classroom with the kids, it’s non-stop and can be very tiring, but it’s fun. Lots of days, I go home splattered with paint or glitter or glue, but it all washes off. Some days I get sneezed on, but I just figure it’s building my immune system. I rarely get sick.
Home Depot Hijack: I also had a friend who worked there for a couple of years, and just LOVED it. She had always worked in retail, and said she liked working there the best. (She quit to stay home when she had another child). She always said she was sorry she spent so many years in shitty clothing store jobs, and wished she had worked at Home Depot all those years instead.
Depending on the time of year, I do anywhere from an hour of actual work a day to five or six. (That also depends on if you count graduate courses as work, since I am working on a degree.)
With me, the problem is that the work comes in spurts and it usually doesn’t take me as long as everyone else thinks it will. (Occasionally it takes longer, but that’s usually due to a problem with whatever equipment I’m using.)
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I sometimes work out of town for a day or two up to several weeks at a time. When I do that, I ave a 12-14 hr work day. 'Cause we want to get back home, you see.
Here at home, I’ll usually pull an 8 hr day the days I’m working. Depending on weather and time crunches, it may be anywhere from 5 to 16 hrs, though. Extremely flexible.
When helping out my bud at the print shop, it’s about 2 to 6 hrs, real hit and miss.
I often take off several days at a time by scheduling some downtime between jobs. Being single/no kids makes this a very doable alternative. Even during those times, I’m often on the phone, scheduling some job or bid down the line, or out of the house looking at new bids to submit or selling crap online. But, often, it’s just play.
So… I alternately work my ass to absolute bone for long periods of time, or I laz around a lot.
I’d say I usually do about 6 hours of work a day…unless I am hung over in which case I do only want cannot wait until tomorrow…and that usually adds up to about 30 minutes.
It’s hard to calculate when teaching college courses. Sure, I could say three hours a week for each one. But there are untold and unpaid hours spent preparing, hustling copies, planning, grading, recording grades, saving them on disk, and doing administrative things.
I also work a side job in an assessment center, but usually no more than six hours a week due to the regulations (no more than 8 hrs. per week for reasons I don’t know).
I’d say maybe 3-5 hours per day, plus 1-2 hours of sitting in useless meetings. Unfortunately, these hours often seem to come up after 6pm. My favorite is getting a call from a client after 6 and hearing “we have something we need you to do tonight. I’ll call you back in an hour or so to schedule the meeting.” This inevitably means staying until at least 10pm for what’s usually about 15 minutes of actual work.
Well, from mid-August to early June, I work 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week. Sorta. I teach from 7:15 to 2:45, minus lunch and passing periods and conference period. But then you have to add meetings, debate team practices, and after-school prep. Plus I have all-day Speech Tournaments at least 2 weekends a month, with the odd 3-day marathon tournament thrown into the mix. But I also get a week off at Thanksgiving, 2 weeks for Christmas, and two weeks Spring Break. So it gets kinda complicated.
From mid-June until mid-August, I work 0 hours a day, and love every second of it!
I’m a tech-support guy, so it varies from day to day. Some days there are new calls rolling in all day long. Others there aren’t. Of course, a lot of the “goofing off” I’d do instead of working is itself work-related, cause I’m a f*king geek, like Oracle 9i CBTs, or going through Linux Device Drivers, etc.
Of course, I try to get the FDA recommended daily allowance of surfing, but some days, alas, I just can’t.
