Even though there’s always something to do at our jobs (during down-time) I’ve noticed that there have been some days where there’s nothing else to do (after completing our daily tasks/responsibilities for the day) along with some things that can’t be done until closing time or the next day.
IMO, it all depends on the job and what things need to be done, even though warehouse/factory jobs are an exception: when they sometimes run out of work before their scheduled time to leave.
Well, it’s SOP around here.
Believe me I try to lean and look busily engaged. Funny I never seem to fool anyone.
I had a teacher who wouldn’t let you finish work and just sit staring at the clock. She’d give you a broom or a assignment to alphabetize her book shelf.
If it kept happening the whole class got extra work and then you paid the price outside of class.
I’ve never heard of this “saying”. Care to explain what you think it means?
Then once we know that, we can discuss where and when it is and isn’t applicable.
The idea is, if you’re at work and you are leaning against something, you’re idle, not doing anything at all. If you can find the time to lean and do nothing, you can find the time to do a little bit of tidying up around the workplace.
I think it’s more of a retail saying than anything else.
Heard it a number of times. Essentially it just means “Stop fucking off and go do something productive”
I’ve had jobs where there really wasn’t anything to do at a certain point. Any extra “work” at that point was performative to justify paying you your hourly wage.
I’d also say that a certain amount of idleness in some places helps create a more cohesive working environment among employees and prevent burnout. This is talking about idleness after your primary tasks are done, not saying that everyone should dick around instead of doing their job.
Thanks all. Clearly the saying fits some jobs but not all.
If cleaning is one of your expected “additional duties” as we called them in USAF, then yeah, when you’re idle the boss probably expects you to do some of that cleanup stuff. Not unlike the “side work” waitstaff in restaurants are expected to do.
It’s very true for the jobs it applies to, which isn’t nearly all of them. It applies to jobs that includes some level of daily cleaning or cleaning-like tasks. I only heard in in food service jobs, never in office jobs but I suppose it could also apply to retail work in some circumstances. The idea is that in some jobs there 1) is always something that needs cleaning or organizing and 2) There isn’t a lot of specialization - in a fast-food restaurant ,the kitchen workers clean the kitchen, the people who work in the dining room sweep and mop the floor and clean the restrooms and so on.
Old-time sailors would “scrape cable”, the ultimate makework task.
I agree, when I was a busboy in a restaurant, the owner was notorious for dragging any idle employee into a bathroom and making them clean it. We got very good at always looking industrious.
The great thing about my last job (part time, wfh, actuarial job) is that when i didn’t have anything to do, i just clocked out. And I’d check from time to time to see if anything landed in my inbox.
(And by “clock out”, i mean, “making a note in the little spiral bound book i used to keep track of my hours”.)
Most of my jobs have been salaried, and i always felt that screwing around when i didn’t have anything much to do was offset by staying late to meet deadlines. I think it must be awkward to have an hourly job with extended stretches when there’s isn’t any work to be done.
One of the key points I look for in a new job is the idea that there will be frictional activities that will occasionally mean there’s nothing to do and that if there’s nothing to do, you don’t have to do anything. I consider it a necessary perk of the job.
I heard this quite frequently when I worked a fast-food job ages ago.
Basically, if there are no customers to serve and you’ve finished all your other tasks, then you should clean something instead of leaning on the counter. No matter how much you’ve cleaned, there’s always something that could be even cleaner.
At my barber shop there’s usually a receptionist. And about 6 barbers working pretty steadily. Often the receptionist is sweeping the floor to corral the hair into a vacuum cleaner thingy. When they’re busy or not on duty, one of the barbers between customers will do the same.
Another example of jobs with some inherent downtime where cleaning is fully one of the real, albeit minor, duties of the job. Ref @colinfred, even so there’s often time for a couple barbers to be yakking or fiddling with their phones for 15-20 minutes while somebody else runs the broom for 5 minutes.
OTOH, I’ve almost never had a job where cleaning was an inherent part of my duties. Back in college I TA’d at a computer “lab”. Back in the day when that was first a roomful of keypunches and later green-screen dumb terminals. When not helping students we emptied trash cans, keypunch chads, rearranged misplaced chairs, etc.
Count me in with the “heard it working in a restaurant” contingent. My take on it is that yes, you can always find something to clean, but in my experience, the managers also seemed to be concerned about (a) not letting the customers see employees standing around shooting the shit, and (b) exerting control.
The manager who ran the place for most of the time I was there (two years) straight-up told me (a). I’m not prepared to say (b) applies to all the managers and assistant managers I worked with, but I’m certain it very much did for at least a couple of them.
It’s terrible - I had two jobs like that, one hourly and one salaried*. Neither was work from home, and neither was very predictable about when the work could be done , so I couldn’t leave and come back. Even though I could read, watch TV , read the SD (depending on the time period) when there was no work , I would have much rather have done those things at home.
* The salaried one was kind of a special case - the best comparison is a lawyer who has multiple cases before different judges and with different lawyers on the other side. I might only have two hours of actual work to do but it could take a whole day to get those two hours done because of needing three people to be available at the same time which couldn’t be scheduled x minutes apart because there was no way to tell in advanced how much time was needed for each.
I don’t agree. People need some rest. Even outside of their scheduled work breaks. If someone has time to lean, that can often just be well-deserved extra rest, not time to clean or do some other task.
I was a pump jockey in High School and I’m convinced that saying was invented by a gas station owner.
It means “time to get a better job”.
That’s my take, reading this thread.