jobs where you have so little to do you think your boss is virtually boring you to the point where you have no choice but to up and leave

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im bored (c) iggy pop.

― blahbarian, Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:40 (twenty-one years ago)

oh god I can relate right now!

― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:47 (twenty-one years ago)

me too. sigh.

― Huk-L, Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:47 (twenty-one years ago)

Living for the weekends baby!

― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:48 (twenty-one years ago)

7 more days! Then I'm free and well on my way back to the darkest depths of student-y poverty and working at the damn video store.

― adam (adam), Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:49 (twenty-one years ago)

i seem to work harder at making it look like i have something to do than doing actual work!

― blahbarian, Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:49 (twenty-one years ago)

i hate work.

― ken c (ken c), Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:52 (twenty-one years ago)

Once upon a time, when I was nominally in charge of supervising some part-time workers, I had a guy quit because we didn't give him enough to do. I was appalled. It was a part-time, $7/hour kind of job -- certainly not the sort of situation where a person would expect increasing responsibilities and career advancement. "I have so much stuff I need to work on," he said; "I can't just sit here and do nothing for four hours." "Dude," said I, "if we haven't given you stuff to do, you're totally welcome to sit and work on whatever else you need to get done." He didn't really have an answer to that. He just quit.

You guys need to develop hobbies you can participate in at work. If they don't give you stuff to do, you can put in a little time on your ship in a bottle.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:53 (twenty-one years ago)

i feel bad though when doing other work i need to do AT work. maybe i should ask my boss if thats ok to do though. but then he might think 'well if hes just doing his own work, why am i keeping him here!?'

― blahbarian, Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Sure there's ILX for that but after two weeks of pressing the F5 button even you lot get a bit tedious!

PS only joking I love you all!!!!!!!!!!1

― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 12 May 2005 17:56 (twenty-one years ago)

I've figured out that, for the most part, all the head honchos here care about is that I'm sitting up at the front desk smiling at people as they walk in. Also, they appreciate it when I say Hello and offer clients something to drink. They don't seem to care at all that I am online the entire day playing on ILX and emailing and going to band websites.

― Sarah McLusky (coco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:01 (twenty-one years ago)

Also, I've found my coworkers just want me to be there to listen to them talk about their every day lives and complain about their jobs.

I'm not complaining myself. I'm just saying that days can drag sometimes, especially when I start getting a headache from playing online.

― Sarah McLusky (coco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:05 (twenty-one years ago)

in such situations you just have to start being creative! Invent projects, invite ppl to meetings about these projects etc. I don't speak from experience of course. Oh no. Not at all.

― MarkH (MarkH), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:08 (twenty-one years ago)

Hmmm, I like the way you think...

― Huk-L, Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:09 (twenty-one years ago)

"Listen, boss, since you haven't given me much to do, I've taken it open myself to completely remodel your office. Seriously, when this thing is done, it's gonna be totally pimped-out. But I'm going to have to take Donna from advertising off of that magazine project, and I'm going to need you to work from home for the next couple months."

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:23 (twenty-one years ago)

(The one problem with demonstrating your own vigor and usefulness is that you mostly have to do it in some stupid way, like alphabetizing periodicals or throwing away outdated phone books or dusting the office supply shelves, and not only is that a really negligible step up from doing nothing, but you run the risk of positioning yourself as the one weirdo in the office who'll allow himself to be given tasks that everyone else would be clearly degraded by.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:26 (twenty-one years ago)

I was so bored last year at work I began designing a table top golf game. I used my work computer to design the holes. I'm almost there.

― laurence kansas (lawrence kansas), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:32 (twenty-one years ago)

I was working this temp to perm job one time and was doing everything I could to ensure they'd keep me. I had been there a couple of months and was getting entirely too efficient and bored. But I thought, I will be good and make life easier for the higher ups. So I organized three huge filing cabinets which were totally out of control. The head honcho asked me what I was doing. Then she let me go the following day, citing that as an example that I didn't have enough work to do.

― Sarah McLusky (coco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Good lord. People should really work out whether they need an employee before they hire them, rather than pulling "you're efficient and dedicated enough to make us realize we don't need this position" crap.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:42 (twenty-one years ago)

Wh3rd

Altho if it leads to more table-top golf games who could be opposed

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 12 May 2005 18:46 (twenty-one years ago)

Well, not surprisingly, the partners at work were opposed but then I told them you can't spell partner without "par" and it was smoothed over with back slapping and secretary ogling.

― laurence kansas (lawrence kansas), Thursday, 12 May 2005 19:21 (twenty-one years ago)

I had a job like that a while ago. Looking back, it was a combination of C&D across the board. It was a long commute in bad traffic (over one hour one way) and there was nothing to do once I got there. One classic part was they paid me A LOT of money, (more than I had ever made before) and I had been unemployed for more than three months prior without even an interview. I felt I had to recoup financial losses from having had no job. The days dragged by, and I even asked my boss why they didn’t give me anything to do. I was told that I needed to get the feel of the company before I was allowed to get involved in any projects and to be patient. So, I sat day in and day out and played on the computer all day. I kept a tally of each day’s net cash profit in my calendar as a reminder why I should stay even though I was bored out of my mind. After six months of this, I began to snoop around a bit and discovered the company was sort of a front for a religious group that I won’t name and all the employees were deeply involved with this religion. I felt really weird and wondered if they were going to try and induct me into the cult. It was classic in the oddness of the whole thing from the mystery angle and me snooping around like nancy drew, classic cuz of the big bucks I banked, classic cuz I got a lot of personal stuff done while getting paid for it (like looking for a new job!) and it gave me time to think about my life and future job. Dud cuz of the hellish commute, dud cuz it was so frightfully boring sometimes I thought the day would never end and dud cuz there weren’t even any friends to be made in the place and I was very alone at the time. I stayed another month and then left without any guilt or sadness about the entire experience.

― Wiggy (Wiggy), Thursday, 12 May 2005 19:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm really bored at work lately. I've found Monday and Tuesdays are hell, but the rest of the week IS A SNOREFEST. There are things I could do, I'm sure - like file, or organize, but I guess I'm just too lazy to go the extra mile.

― jill schoelen is the queen of my dreams! (Homosexual II), Thursday, 12 May 2005 19:33 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm not too lazy to go the extra 575 yards (par 5, dog leg left).

― laurence kansas (lawrence kansas), Thursday, 12 May 2005 19:46 (twenty-one years ago)

I just wish I had my own office.

― $V£N! (blueski), Thursday, 12 May 2005 20:34 (twenty-one years ago)

So OTM. The only way you can do this is by doing these tasks for yourself, by doing only things that will make you're job easier. But then no-one high up notices. Bummer.

― Markelby (Mark C), Thursday, 12 May 2005 20:40 (twenty-one years ago)

> "if we haven't given you stuff to do, you're totally welcome to sit and work on whatever else you need to get done."

gotta be careful about this - a lot of contracts (espec in software industry) have clauses saying that anything you invent / work on in company time ~~are belong to us~~ belongs to the company.

― koogs (koogs), Friday, 13 May 2005 07:24 (twenty-one years ago)

doglatin you live for the weekends when your not working them bless you

xxxk

― battlingspacemonkey (battlingspacemonkey), Friday, 13 May 2005 13:09 (twenty-one years ago)

Living for the weekends baby!

Living for the ~~weekends~~ baby actually.

― nathalie's baby (stevie nixed), Friday, 13 May 2005 13:15 (twenty-one years ago)

I get work to do, but then I get it off my desk in lightening speed time. Get it off! Get it off! I feel like I'm doing target practice. But then I worry it looks too clean.

― Sarah McLusky (coco), Friday, 13 May 2005 13:16 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm trying to remember what working was actually like right now...

― The Square Root Of Negative Two (kate), Friday, 13 May 2005 13:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Use the look-busy method, or they will give you more shit to do in your Busy Period (my problem).

I quit my last job (after finally getting an offer) because I literally spent a year dying to tell my supervisor he was the biggest nitwit I ever worked for.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Friday, 13 May 2005 13:34 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm ultra-organized and my desk is always spotless. So people who don't work in my department think I have nothing to do and that I do nothing. Listen, jackmonkey, just because your office is a tornado doesn't mean you work harder than I do.

My boss doesn't bore me, though. He's hilarious, especially when he doesn't mean to be. Earlier this week our CEO came in to badger him about how a systems upgrade was going, and my boss gave the standard non-answer. The CEO prodded some more and eventually my boss started getting technical so the CEO got bored and cut him off with "I trust you'll make some headway soon". After the CEO walked out, my boss mutters under his breath in a Napoleon Dynamite-esque way "Or maybe I'll just kill myself".

― Rebekkah (burntbrat), Friday, 13 May 2005 13:38 (twenty-one years ago)

This has always seemed completely idyllic to me! But maybe it wouldn't if I actually had to do it, I dunno.

One of my strongest childhood memories is of being told by my mother that I was to be locked in the bathroom for two hours as a punishment for something or other, aged about... five? I can still remember that heartthrill, the way it seemed to spread across my whole chest, of hearing that I was gonna get to sit there and imagine stuff, undisturbed, for hours...

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Friday, 13 May 2005 22:16 (twenty-one years ago)

"if we haven't given you stuff to do, you're totally welcome to sit and work on whatever else you need to get done."

Woah. I have never worked anywhere with this kind of attitude!!! Right from my very first shitty job (working the 1 hour photo minilab in a pharmacy), I had bosses who believed you must always have busywork, if not atual work, or you werent earning your keep and you'd likely be let go.

Even my civil service job, dull as it was, was always busy in the production line kind of way (processing 1000s of passports a day is no fun, but hell is there always somethin to do - the staff would compete against each other on tallies and harrass those who did less).

My current job has become reasonably quiet due to ironing out the techmnical problems that'd caused a lot of client calls/server breakdowns etc, so my boss is already making ominous "oh its quiet? We must start you on learning X then" noises. So I've been landed with a massive, boring spreadsheet I have to go thru and transpose a bunch of MAC and IP addresses into a Salesforce database. I dont mind actually, I just stick on the headphones and off I go - but my workmate is THE MOST ANNOYING FLAPPY QUEEN IN THE UNIVERSE and talks non stop and whines and complains and constantly says America is better than Australia and he cant wait to move in a month and I will be SO glad when he fucks off.

― Trayce (trayce), Saturday, 14 May 2005 00:00 (twenty-one years ago)

...which er, had nothing to do with the topic, but I guess it's been on my nerves, heh.

― Trayce (trayce), Saturday, 14 May 2005 00:02 (twenty-one years ago)

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jobs where you have so little to do you think your boss is virtually boring you to the point where you have no choice but to up and leave - C or D?