I have a job where we receive work assignments, when there is work. If I receive one, I jump on it and even recently stayed to finish an important assignment when I wasn’t feeling great. Of late, there has not been a whole lot of work to go around, and I have found myself spending the majority of my work day on SDMB.
I feel bad, but I guess not bad/ambitious enough to seek out work that I could do during the lag times. I believe that if the IT people removed access to SDMB as they have Facebook and a couple of my other old sites, I would live through it. But as for now, I am feeling quite unproductive and almost guilty for getting paid to skim/post on the SDMB for 8 hours a day!
Yes, and we didn’t even have internet access at the time. How boring. And my boss had deliberatly stripped me of most of my assignements, so no guilt. He also had put me in an office with a woman who would speak to me exactly twice a day : to say hello when she came in and good bye when she was leaving. I’m exagerating. She spoke two other times during this three months period. Once to complain because I had cleaned her mouse, and once to complain because I had smoked on the balcony. Putting us in the same office too was deliberate on my boss’ part.
So, no suggestions. My experience doesn’t seem applicable to yours.
I feel you. My job can be very feast-or-famine. Today I didn’t get caught up on my to-do list until 4:45. Other days I’m done by 11am. I can’t really ask for more work because, if I get it, then I won’t be able to finish on my busy days (and a lot of the stuff HAS to be done same-day because it’s a bank). There’s only so much make-work I can do before I decide, “Aww, fuckit” and read forums.
The last few weeks at work, I had very little to do, and I wasn’t sure if anyone could or should give me some more work to do (my usual supervisor has been away for a while.) I spent most of my time on twitter and TVTropes - I didn’t want to go on the SDMB because it’d be way too easy for any reasonably tech-savvy coworker to find out who I am on this board (my username is very close to my real name) and find out way too much about me.