Varies. I teach high school, so it ranges from “lecture all period, all day” to “projects are being worked on, see me if you have questions.” I usually hit the Dope on my lunch break, and when I can between periods. Debate practice takes an hour or so after school, so they get their money’s worth with me, no matter how much time I surf during the day. 
my work runs in roughly 6 week cycles of busy, then not busy.
busy usually means i’m working almost every minute of my day, compressed lunches, and consistent overtime. during these periods the boss pays for parking so some of us can drive to work rather than take transit, to net an extra hour of sleep, and buys dinner during overtime.
not busy means i work fairly consistently from 6am to 8:30 while i’m alone, and then spend the rest of the day surfing the net or tooling various makework projects (all in the vain of making the few hours of work i do even less), followed by about 30 minutes of work before i leave at 2:30.
as far as dead-end jobs go, this one rates pretty good.
I’m a Rosie the Riveter type, so except for a scheduled break and lunch period, I work my entire shift.
We live for the occasional parts shortage or equipement malfunction, helps to break up the monotony.
On Mondays and Thursdays, I don’t do anything until 4 PM, and then there are only a few things I need to do until 6.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have not much to do until 3 PM, then it’s busy until 6.
Fridays I’m usually busy from about 1 PM on, doing multiple tasks.
It’s the nature of the business, and hey, I just got a raise!
I work retail. (textbooks)
90% of the time I’m reading or surfing the web, unless it’s rush, then I’m busy 100% of the time.
I work from 8-5 mon through fri. I teach class from 9-12 and 1-4 and interview people on call through out the day. However, I do have a training partner and we trade off on training and interviewing throughout the day. So there is some surfing and game playing for about 2 hours a day.
I’m an MT with a 2000 line a day minimum, so there’s not a lot of room for fucking off unless I get a stream of perfect dictators. When that does happen from time to time, I alternate between working, screwing around here, blogging, and chatting on AIM.
My job, basically, is to deal with problems when they arise. (Other people are there to handle the routine things.) So if there’s no problems, I essentially do nothing (usually I read or play computer games - I don’t have internet access at work). But to make up for this, sometimes there’s a lot of problems all at once.
I free-lance in television and film production. If working on a feature it’ll be a few weeks of 6, 12 hour days. Otherwise it’s commercials, industrials et al and I’m working maybe 10 or 12 days a month. Very intense work while on, great goofing off while not. What I love is no “busy work”, no having to look like I’m working because when I’m on assignment it’s non-stop 'til the end of the day. Then it’s go home or to a movie or take a trip. No boss!
This is the first year my workplace has had this position, so they had no idea what to expect.
I have about a day’s worth of work left till early August, so…right now most of the day is spent online or napping in my chair.
Hey hey, we’re in kind of the same line of work. I focus more on the industrials, tho. We get lots of them here in Vegas, ya know.
We’re not allowed to use the internet where I work. And even if we could, I’m there to answer stupid questions (I’m a supervisor, and I’ve had really needy subordinates lately), and they never let up. Therefore, I’m truly busy for just about every minute I’m not on break, so 7 to 8 hours a day.
In residency, it varied by rotation. The months I was on the inpatient service, I was invariably in the hospital 80 hours a week, and while there were weeks when that might have added up to only about 60 hours of work, just as often it was nonstop for the full 80. Even lunch breaks included a “noon conference” every day.
When I was working in the clinic, I was there about 45 hours a week, doing 45 hours of work when it was busy and maybe 35-40 when it wasn’t.
When I was on “elective” rotations, where I was often just tagging along with a specialist attending in his clinic, it’s hard to say that I was actually accomplishing anything.
Oof- here goes.
I work about 5 to 20 minutes a day. I’m a “consultant” and my main job is to be nearby the site and “billable”, any warm body will do. There have been plenty of job sites where I was there 8 hours humping equipment, but there have been many many more days where I roll in 9am, take an hour lunch, and am on my way home by 1:30pm.
My boss knows this as do most other trades on the jobsite. Yes, my industry is a joke.
I’m a deli clerk in a grocery store. More than half of the deli staff have only been there for a month or less. Our hours just got cut so we are understaffed. The one employee that is better than me and works harder than me transferred to the overnight shift to avoid the customers.
I am on my feet for 8 1/2 hours with either one fifteen minute break or no breaks at all. I’m either slicing meat/cheese/scooping salads or putting on/taking off the rotissere chickens or loading/unloading the fryer or washing dishes or cleaning the deli or on and on and on. :mad:
Short answer: more work than I should be doing.
I finished all of my work for the entire week by about 10:30 a.m. today. I might work another 30 minutes or so each day, if anything urgent arises. I’m not sure why my job exists, sometimes, but I’m not complaining.
At first, I worked a solid eight hours a day, but then I streamlined the process. Now I spend a lot of time playing around online.
i am lead technician for a small fire alarm company. i have four seperate projects underway at one of our largest customer sites. i catch about a third of the service calls that come in during the day, and i have two weeks out of six that i am on 24 hour call.
if i tried to slack off, i would neve be able to keep up.
With my previous employer I must have only done about 3 to 4 hours of actual, solid work in an 8-hour day. There was so much idle time, and if it weren’t for an Internet connection (and the SDMB) I would have gone nuts.
At my present job I probably do about 6 to 7 hours of real work in an 8-hour day. There is still some idle time, but it’s more spread out.
Well I’m working for the summer in Fort Myers, Florida until school starts. I’m working for Pike Electric as a lowly groundman making 11.50 an hour, 17.25 overtime and when we work ten days in consecutively with premium I make 14.50 and 21.75 with overtime. Pretty good money I think for having absolutely no experience and only being twenty years old and I also get $50 tax free per diem for every day I work. Well I generaly work every Monday through Friday for ten hours and do pretty shitty stuff like dig holes, bond poles, drive the truck a little, basically I am the lineman’s bitch. The work really isn’t as hard as one would think but it can get very hot. We might be going out of town tomorrow to an area badly damaged by the hurricane but nothing is definite.
I knew I’d be jealous if I opened this thread. I have to spend 7 hours at work a day, and I’d say that at least six of it are spent doing uninterrupted work. Teaching is like being on stage-- you can’t get away with surfing the net or anything else. The other hour is lunch and parts of my prep period and study hall, though I often have to work through them too.
Also, the work day almost never ends when the school day ends. I have to stay late rather often without getting any extra pay, grading papers, entering grades, helping kids, etc. This is why we get summers off, and I think it works out in the end, time-wise.