I’m like that guy in Office Space who admitted that in any given week, he does 15 minutes of work. Well, in a usual week, I maybe do an hour or two of work, even though I’m paid for 37.5 hours. Don’t get me wrong - the work that I do is exemplary - but the rest of the time I just stare at my monitor and, when my manager isn’t around, check out the SDMB and other sites.
So I show up every day, and I’m there to do anything that’s needed of me. There are a couple of areas in which I’m my group’s expert, so they might need me at any point. But it sucks that I asked my manager for this Friday and next Monday off so I could go to visit my parents for my birthday (a week late) and she said, OK, but keep it tentative, because we might need you. Well, it’s nice to know I might be needed, but still…
Have I not rammed the ins and outs of FrameMaker through your heads? Are you incapable of reading my style guide that explains it all? Do you not know how to adjust the numbering on appendices (we have to say appendixes)? It’s all in my fucking style guide. I didn’t spend three months writing it as a resource for my group for you to suddenly need me in some crisis. It’s all right there. Read the fucking thing. Let me have my bloody two days off.
Don’t get me wrong. When I do have to work, it’s very complicated, technical, and what not. Many a time I’ve found myself with my hands shoved into the guts of a computer, trying to figure out connections that I’m either going to document, illustrate, or both. Yes, I’m grateful that this job has given me a ton of experience and skills. However, does it always have to be so boring? When you know your manager knows you have nothing to do, how do you feign working? I don’t know the answer, but I’ve been doing it ever since I’ve been working there. Fine, pay me a large sum of money for a couple of hours of work every two weeks. I’ve earned it, because I did it with flying colors.
Wow. You really ought to report the guy who’s holding the gun to your head and forcing you to read threads that you don’t really want to read. I’m sure there’s a law being broken there.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Technical Writing. 3 weeks of boredom, 1 week of insanity.
I don’t know how long you have been doing it, but it gets easier. And eventually you can figure out how to exactly manipulate the system to work for you.
I would say that so far in my career 90% of my time has been spent on the SDMB, or on the Adobe MB, or sending thousands of emails back and forth to my friends. I just consider it part of the job. They pay me to be there in case an “emergency” happens. An emergency usually amounts to 15 minutes of explaining how to export to a PDF or the creation of an illustration. So if just picture yourself as some sort of office super hero, I find it helps to have “Damn it feels good to be a Gangsta” ala Office Space, running through your head for most of the day.
I do remember your thread a couple of weeks ago about the layoff scare. I have found in this line of work that the company needs you far more than you need it. Hell, my current company hired me during a huge round of layoffs. There aren’t many people who can/want to do our boring-assed job, so keep that in mind the next time things seem shaky. Your skills are more marketable than you think.
Not your fault if there isn’t enough work for you to do, but you still might be needed in an emergency.
Are there any other duties you could take over? Maybe you could even suggest taking on other duties if there are any - that way you stay busy enough not to get bored out of your head, and you look all bright and keen and useful, and therefore more likely to escape layoff.
Although, if the management can’t distribute work among people in a sensible way, they will end up making layoffs.
I once temped for a big, now bankrupt oil company in the UK. For me it was just a vacation job, until starting my postgrad. When I arrived, I was overwhelmed with horror at the huge workload. I got stuck in straight away.
After a couple of weeks, I realised that I had effectively ploughed through my lazy-bitch-predecessor’s SIX MONTH BACKLOG. And what with the general summer slowdown, there was sweet fuck all for me to do except the odd letter and handing the post round. I took on work from two other departments, there still wasn’t enough to fill my day.
So I played Minesweeper. I got shit hot at it. I played for hooouuurs every day. They got mad. They kept asking me to stop. They said it looked bad (“clients” might see - what fucking clients? this was the finance department not sales, plus all their clients were over-the-phone petrol stations anyway. And people wanting “lubes” snicker).
So I smiled, said of course, and just kept playing. They kept asking me to stop, I kept playing.
At the end of September I quit and went back to Uni. Buh-bye!
I’ll see your tech writing position and raise you a dollar. I write aircraft flight and maintenance manuals. I have never been so bored in my life as I have since taking this job. A month ago I was given 4 manuals that each were expected to take another three months to complete. I’m done with 3 of them. So for the past couple of weeks I have been proofreading them for errors. I’m allowed a max of 3 errors of any kind per 100 pages when my books go to QA. (spelling, punc, grammar, format, accuracy, graphics, etc). Over and over and over I read the same data looking for missed periods, errant commas, dangling motherfuckers, etc. I have to sneak on this, because we can’t “excessively” use the internet for non-business stuff. But they haven’t quantified that term. I take vacation days now and then simply because I get to a point where I can’t take the boredom any longer. I’d take more vacation days, but my boss doesn’t like it. He thinks I have too much work to do and doesn’t want me to fall behind. It was a beautiful change from my last job, completely the opposite. Now, the novelty has worn off.
If anyone wonders why it is then that I write so crappy in this place, it’s BECAUSE I CAN!!! I can do anything I want when typing… lots… of… these…, bunches of (), poor paragraph structure, incomplete sentences, etc… I can even say etc… followed by more of these…
Enough bitching for now. They may be reading this as I speak.
32 hour/week worker, maybe 5 hours of actual work per week. I could do more, but I’d run out of projects pretty quickly and then I’d only have 2 hours of work per week! Fortunately, playing with Adobe and Macromedia software counts as “work” (self-edjamicating and all that), but even that only goes so far. I spend much more time on the SD and writing e-mails than I do work in a typical week.
Thanks for the opportunity to share, Senor Attn. Ho. Here’s my story.
At my job all the hard workers got laid off, including my manager and all my team members. Apparently I have some desirable set of skills. Must be on my resume or some shit. It’s surreal, cause my job skill most valuable to me is managing expectations, i.e. here’s why you can’t have what you want from me at this time. I think I’m approaching expert proficiency.
So I got the Office Space resonance too. Apparently going to the Shedd Aquarium for four hours to watch the dolphins, leaving at 1:30 to play golf once a week, and usually showing up a half hour late and hungover, has saved me from corporate restructuring woes.
If I believed in karma, I’d be nervous. As it is, I’m <evil willow>BORED NOW</ew> and jaded. My current aspiration involves getting rich by being an innovator in internet porn. My disenfranchised, dismayed, disillusioned colleages are warming to the idea real quick.
I love my tech writing job. I get to write stuff on interesting topics for college level computer text books. I’m just finishing up a chapter on “big” computer systems - supercomputers and nationwide systems like FedEx uses. I got to read up on the supercomputer that beat Kasparov in chess, and all the neat things people are doing in medical research with supercomputer (folding proteins and such). I’m currently working on a hands-on lab on how to download and install SETI@home, and will get paid to go through the SETI Web page and figure out what all those technical terms mean and how close we are to finding aliens.
'course, the bad part is that, as of now, it’s not enough work to be full time. That means I get to screw off 1/2 the day, though. I could use the money, but Mr. Athena makes enough to pay the bills (barely) so it’s not that big of a deal. The pay ain’t great, either, since I’m considered an apprentice. Were I to work full time, I’d make almost 2/3 as much as I made at my last job, without benefits or stock options or anything like that.
Which brings me to my last job. Mindlessly dull. I screwed off a lot, and got paid a lot of money. I’d come into work and surf the Web all day. When I did work, it was dull, and even when it wasn’t dull, I was so burnt out on programming that it was like pulling teeth to get myself to do it. It didn’t help that I worked for a Dilbert-esque boss. At various times, he’d:
not allow people to move from interior offices to empty offices with lots of light and windows, because he might hire someone with more seniority. Nevermind that there’d been a hiring freeze for months.
The closer we got to a deadline, and the more work that had to be done, the more meetings he’d have. Towards the end of projects, we’d have daily meetings that could easily take up two hours of the day.
He once gave me a shitty review, bad raise, and very few stock options because he said I had only 2500 lines of code to maintain and my peers had more like 15,000 - 20,000. I asked him how he got that metric and ran it myself. I had 17,000 lines of code to maintain. When I confronted him with this, he initially acted very contrite and apologized, but later that week came back and said he was going to stand by his shitty appraisal of me because of ‘other reasons.’ When I asked him what these reasons were, he mumbled something about me not entering as many bugs into the bug database as I should. As far as I knew, it wasn’t my responsibility to enter bugs into the bug database - when I found a bug, I reported it to the QA department, who did further research and if it was a bug, entered it into the database. This was the official bug-reporting procedure for developers. WTF?
in his favor, he once sent out an email with the subject “It’s now time for the Spank the Monkey test!” After gathering myself up from the puddle of laughter on the floor that I had become, I asked him if he knew what spanking the monkey was. He said it meant doing high level, intense software testing. I let him believe that.
I’m so fucking happy I don’t work for him anymore.
Wow I had no idea this was so common. I did a job as a technical writer for a company that was doing ISO 9002 documentation. I was hired to work during my summer vacation from college, and the assignment they gave me was assumed to take 3 months to complete.
I finished it in five weeks.
Basically when I started, I never worked in an ‘office’ type environment before, and assumed the expectations were considerably higher than the retail jobs I had before. So I worked my ass off. I even started half an hour early and stayed an hour late (didn’t ask to be payed overtime for that, personally didn’t care!) I loved it. I did really well at that point, because I would be given a specific task that I could focus on, and usually complete it in a timely manner. Being the only person in the office who could type 70 WPM also helped, and being the only computer-literate guy in the whole factory was a big plus. As my workload waned, I started having more idle time. My manager took mondays off, so since he was the only person checking up on me, mondays I would spend about 90% of the day screwing around, surfing the internet, emailing, etc. Actually, this made me feel really guilty, and I was terrified that I’d get caught (I was a few times, but it wasn’t that big of a deal to them). I realized that the pace I was working I’d wind up with nothing to do, so I started getting things done but pretending I was still working on them, then stare at the celing or something and if they asked about the task I’d tell them I just finished. Eventually, I DID run out of documentation work/filing updating to do, and my Techical Writing job transmuted into janitorial work, because that was all there was to do. My pay was the same, however, so it was still cool with me. Even cleaning up the factory I worked in, however, would have its limits, with the whole place spotless. Before I was laid off because the factory was losing too much money, I would spend most of my time slowly sweeping up metal shavings from the tool room, talking about the NRA and government with the factory’s machinist.
Wheeee! Add me to the list of people who work for 15 minutes a week.
I have a boring, boring, boring job. I make medications for drug studies. I have to pack capsules with medication, cornstarch, and riboflavin. I make about 250 capsules a week, and I usually save them up for the last minute because A.) I am a procrastinating slacker and B.) if I didn’t, I would have NOTHING to do and no ‘crunch time’. I spend about 90% of my day reading the SDMB, 8% reading email, and 2% sending IMs to various friends.
The only reason I have anything to do is because I save it all up. I found that if I save up my work, it makes that one day that I have to get it done go a smidge faster. Right now, I have about 700 medicine packs to write up. The monitor for the study will be here on Monday. When do you think I’ll start working on this? Yup, Thursday. That way I can get it done, and still piss around on the boards all day on Friday. Ever since I started this job, I’ve cleaned and rearranged my office about 5 times. (thanks, pbr!) I’ve even gone as far as to clean the floor with a squirt bottle filled with 409 and some paper towels. I make cd covers. I call the radio station and talk to my friends. I continuosly work on a book I’ve been writing for about 3 years now. I have read every Stephen King book all over again.
When my boss calls? “I’m writing up the meds for the Blah-biddy-Blah study,” or “I’m making capsules.” Luckily her office is in another building about 3 blocks away. If I need her here, I have to call to arrange it.
