How to kill time at work, part one

In the last few years, I’ve become very skilled in my ability to kill time at work. It’s not something I wanted to be good at – for obvious reasons, superior abilities in enterprises like pro basketball, movie-starring and running Fortune 100 companies into the can would be better, at least for my sagging bank account. It’s an ability I’ve developed of necessity. Either I go mad, or I find a way to distract myself during long intercontinental business flights and treadmill workouts, both the kind at the gym and those in my career on the corporate Habitrail™.

The business flights have dissipated along with economic prosperity, like the vapor trail I’ve laid over large parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. But the treadmill rolls on and on, allowing me to build increasing frustrations in my workplace and then vent them at 5.6 miles an hour between a teenager jabbering on her cell phone and the elderly gentleman with carbon emission issues of his own.

At work, I’ve collected for myself an array of distractions to make the 9-hour shift pass as quickly as possible. This toolkit includes games, magazines, crossword puzzles, online reading of the latest news and opinion, snooping in on the work of other sites in the hope they’ll screw up, and walking back and forth to the breakroom and bathroom at least 80 times a day. (My doctor’s appointment for diabetes testing is noon Monday).

I thought it might be interesting, though, to chronicle a few of the other details that contribute to the length of my day. Some seem to shorten it while others lengthen it, but all of them together make what I think is a pretty good representation of how too many of us are coping during the work slowdown caused by the current economic climate.

* * *

Thirty-six seconds past 5 am – I arrive at work. I know it’s 36 seconds (one one-hundredth of an hour) past because even though we’re supposed to be a white-collar work force, we still have to punch a time clock. Actually, according to official clocks up and down the Eastern Daylight Time zone, it’s well before 5, but our two time clocks are set five and eight minutes fast, respectively. That might seem annoying to those who aren’t used to it, but for us it means you can clock in on the faster one and out on the slower one, thereby extending your time away from work if you play your clocks right.

5:10 – I’ve finished signing on to my computer, cleaning my workspace of the crumbs left by the second-shift omnivore who shares my desk, and turning on a portable fan to cool myself down. Because our office was built out of a corner of a warehouse, the heating and cooling system has created more microclimates than Napa Valley. The woman sitting no less than four feet to my right is huddled into her jacket with a portable heater blasting at her feet.

5:15 – I finish a quick review of my email. About three-fourths of the messages are from the tech group advising us of computer outages around the network and, five minutes later, the fixing of such outages. Occasionally these are interesting – the Hong Kong office has been closed because of a typhoon, the Sri Lanka office is on a two-hour delay because of civil insurrection, there’s some kind of seismic event in the Philippines – but that’s pretty rare. I’ve also got an email from my former supervisor who periodically borrows me for special projects (more about this later). There’s another one from Health Management Co. that at first glance appears to be related to our recent annual health insurance enrollment, but is unmasked by the subject line “you cannot discount the importance of size.” My guess is that it’s not the size of our health plan savings that they’re talking about.

5:25 – I ask the guy two desks down to my right if he’s heard back from the job interview he went on a few days ago; he has, and it’s good news for him. He’ll start work in two weeks at a local county museum heading up their graphics department. He’s young, smart and full of good ideas, so I take a few minutes to listen and congratulate him. The museum’s specialty is primitive Native American technology. I can’t help but imagine how we’d all fit right in if they wanted to open a new exhibit on the vanishing American office worker. I’d even be willing to pose for the diorama, mouse in hand and StupidVideos.com on screen.

5:30 – I am given some actual work! This is highly significant, considering that I spent two entire days last week not lifting my editing pencil once. The instructions for the 45-page document are encouraging: “please do not assign to vendor”. Despite the generally good job our teams overseas do, it’s always good to see someone still prefers to use a domestic site. The job is full of errors, most of them the fault of either the client or the customer service person who submitted the work to us. The quantity of pages submitted is wrong, the naming conventions for the files are wrong, and there’s evidence the wrong instructions were also given last time because the client has asked not to be billed for some of the changes. As I scan some of the numbers in the graphs, I see that one executive has earned “$6,4379,941” in compensation the previous year. A numerically impossible pay package, I suppose, though I really don’t know that it’s not some new mega-number (ka-zillion, perhaps?) designed specifically to pad executive pockets and outrage the American public. I also notice an error that one of our internal checkers has missed. I fix it but I’m not sure I have the heart to do what else I’m supposed to do in my role as a trainer, and that’s to report him to his supervisor.

Improbably, I find myself less than an hour into a description of my typical day and I’m already up to the length I wanted to devote. Hard to believe, but it looks like this will become a multi-part installment.