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"all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing." This is exactly it. I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a da

by regal 13y ago

"all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing." This is exactly it. I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years (so a whole heck of a lot of time to kill), and frequently spent hours every day reading the news. One day I asked myself, "What have I learned?" I couldn't come up with anything. After that, I quit reading the news and started reading classics like "The Prince" and "The Brothers Grimm" and "The Grapes of Wrath." Much better use of free time than reading the same rehashed stories of shootings and stabbings and rapes and murders and robberies and earthquakes and bombings and shark attacks over and over again with only slightly different details.

throwmeaway141 13y ago
I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but thank you so much for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email. I'm not underperforming, I do everything that's asked of me and plenty more besides, but there's just not enough for me to do. I can't even surf job sites or anything, to find something a bit more stimulating, because my screen is overlooked by colleagues. The workplace is poorly organised and unstructured - there are no performance reviews, no targets, nothing. I end up spending most of the day reading HN in my browser (because it's a 'safe' text based site that I can read without it being eye-catching to colleagues/the boss) and other sites in elinks in a terminal (to prevent images, huge fonts, etc). I also listen to a lot of speech radio, because that's invisible and still stimulating. I don't know why I really wrote this comment, but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am that I know I'm not the only one. It's been 18 months now... (Throwaway because my real account is under my real name.)
- venus 13y ago
  You know what, I had a job like that for a while. It's called being a sysadmin at a medium size company, because after a while, if you're competent, you basically automate yourself out of any regular work. Every now and again would be something irregular - an urgent update, hardware failure, X or Y, but the vast majority of the time there was nothing to do at all. For the first year or two it seems cool to be paid to do nothing but after a while I realised I was literally idling away my life, so I switched to actually building things instead.
  - throwmeaway141 13y ago
    This could also be my story - when I started here, things were set up so inefficiently that it was a full time job. Now, I've scripted and automated most stuff so it just happens, and all I have to do is check that it's happened, and fix it if it hasn't. Sometimes I consider breaking things, just so I've got something to do to fix them...

by regal 13y ago

throwmeaway141 13y ago

I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but thank you so much for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email. I'm not underperforming, I do everything that's asked of me and plenty more besides, but there's just not enough for me to do. I can't even surf job sites or anything, to find something a bit more stimulating, because my screen is overlooked by colleagues. The workplace is poorly organised and unstructured - there are no performance reviews, no targets, nothing. I end up spending most of the day reading HN in my browser (because it's a 'safe' text based site that I can read without it being eye-catching to colleagues/the boss) and other sites in elinks in a terminal (to prevent images, huge fonts, etc). I also listen to a lot of speech radio, because that's invisible and still stimulating. I don't know why I really wrote this comment, but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am that I know I'm not the only one. It's been 18 months now... (Throwaway because my real account is under my real name.)

venus 13y ago
You know what, I had a job like that for a while. It's called being a sysadmin at a medium size company, because after a while, if you're competent, you basically automate yourself out of any regular work. Every now and again would be something irregular - an urgent update, hardware failure, X or Y, but the vast majority of the time there was nothing to do at all. For the first year or two it seems cool to be paid to do nothing but after a while I realised I was literally idling away my life, so I switched to actually building things instead.
- throwmeaway141 13y ago
  This could also be my story - when I started here, things were set up so inefficiently that it was a full time job. Now, I've scripted and automated most stuff so it just happens, and all I have to do is check that it's happened, and fix it if it hasn't. Sometimes I consider breaking things, just so I've got something to do to fix them...