Buffybot ,'Dirty Girls'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Was that slacking number self-reported?
That's what it sounds like:
The No. 1 state for wasting time was Missouri, where workers who responded to the survey reported slacking off 3 hours and 12 minutes a day.
The defensive quotes from Missouri are cracking me up.
"Nobody can match the work ethic of Missourians. This survey, which our busiest citizens did not want to waste their time on, cannot undermine decades of experience. Missouri workers are among the most productive in the world."
Yikes. An oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico is now listing 20-30 degrees after the hurricane: [link]
They are clients of ours - I wrote software that was used during the construction of this platform.
The most beautifully slack job I ever had was temping at the Harvard Business School during the summer. All the professors were away so they just needed somebody to open their mail, answer the phones and type up an occasional bill for some consulting. They were never in the office. I read all of One Hundred Years of Solitude on that job.
I read Heart of Darkness, including the introductory essays (famous one by Achebe), in a day while temping at NPR. And when I was done I was booooored.
I read all of One Hundred Years of Solitude on that job.
I'm sure it felt like real time, too.
I spent a summer translating a novel from the Spanish, while answering phones for a publicity firm. (I didn't finish in that summer, but got pretty far along.) I didn't have the internet, so it was that or Minesweeper or clipping the NY Times for mentions of our clients (which I also did).
I really don't know how people managed to look busy before the internet.
Put a piece of paper in the typewriter. Put an open book in the desk drawer. Open drawer slightly and read. Whenever someone gets close, close the drawer and assume a look of deep thought as you stare at the piece of paper.
Young whippersnappers. We didn't need any of these modern conveniences to slack off.
t gestures with cane
We didn't need any of these modern conveniences to slack off.
But how did you slack without being bored numb?
I worked retail before the internet was invented. So it was dusting shelves. "You got time to lean, you got time to clean" was my boss' motto.
One summer when I was in college I worked at Parklane Hosiery in the mall. As the only part-timer, I soloed on the Fourth of July. I spent all day reading Kafka. The next time I worked my manager tried to berate me for not keeping busy by saying that her friend in another store had seen me just staring into space at the counter, but I knew she was full of shit because I'd actually been reading, and not trying to hide it at all.