[Panzer]

So tell me fellow forum readers. when there is nothing to do at work, how do you go about maintaining the illusion of looking busy. I mean you can only reload macnn, versiontracker, slashdot, and various news sites so much before it gets pretty boring. And what about those annoying coworkers that would get pissed if they saw you slacking?
I tend to keep an ssh connection open to a home computer and can quickly switch to that window and make it look like I"m doing something complicated 'ls -al', how easy is that? I also try to have some technical looking web page loaded up that I can switch to if necessary.
What do you guys do?

[nonhuman]

I don't even try anymore.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by Panzer:
What do you guys do?

I work. There's always something I could be doing.

[Phanguye]

work is dumb... i listen to music... it keeps me fairly entertained... that and the websites

[Plaides]

i don't have internet at my work place, all i have is solitare, and the radio ... its ruff =/

[benb]

I go into another room and sit in front of our POS (that's Point of Sale, but it is the other thing too) system. It runs on SCO OpenServer 5, one of the crappies OS's of all time. Today I get to figure out how to install SSH when OpenServer gives errors installing the VOLS, and I have no gcc. And the VOLS for gcc don't work. Piece of crap. Burn SCO, burn.



And our POS vendor will only support OpenServer. So we are stuck with a dead OS. The whole thing is crap. Really. I could write a better POS system in a year. Just goes to show you that you should never buy software from a bunch of Texans.

[capuchin]

Okay, looking busy is a fine art. The most important thing is to frown a lot, and always be walking somewhere. If you can be holding something techie - a bunch of cables, or an old hard drive might do - all the better. If anyone talks to you, be polite, but a little annoyed.

If you're going to sit in front of your box and read slashdot all day, make sure you have some kind of impressive looking tutorial up on another tab for your switching convenience. I like to have a intimidating page or two of Applescript up on BBEdit, or better yet, a bunch of terminal windows open running top, or some nonsensical shell scripts.

Remember - it's not like you're going to sit on your ass *all* day. Enjoy the peaceful moments at the eye of the storm when you can. In my case, there are plenty of panicky 2am phone calls to make me feel good about goofing off during regular office hours.

[ringo]

[icruise]

What the do you guys do for a living?

[Mastrap]

Originally posted by Icruise:
What the do you guys do for a living?

I was just about asking the same question. I am building my own business. Remind me never to employ anyone of you lot

[Phanguye]

Originally posted by Mastrap:
I was just about asking the same question. I am building my own business. Remind me never to employ anyone of you lot

in my case it isnt a lack of motivation... i have been asking all week for something to do... they never have anything... they just give me stuff that has already been done for me to look over which takes about five minutes...

so pretty much my job is to do nothing... i could even do this job from home so i dont know why they wont let me do that instead of forcing me to site here on this laptop running win95 all day

someone must hate me

luckly i am still in school and this will all be over in 3 weeks

[Panzer]

Originally posted by Icruise:
What the do you guys do for a living?

Not much, or as little as possible. Didn't you gather that from my first post? I wish I could just tele-commute, that way I could just do nothing from home and not have to waste time and money driving there and back. Although I suppose they want me there in the event something actually does happen one day...
Thanks for the ideas capuchin, those were pretty good. I'll have to try that tomorrow. I have plenty of old pci cards sitting around that I can grab and just make up some excuse with: I'm looking for a short on one of the traces, or blown capacitor, melted resistor, chip markings, jumper settings, the list could go on forever...

[scaught]

in my current position, theres not much time to slack.

in my prior position, i had the place set up so it was almost on auto pilot. i could do it all and managed to rack up a pretty good NN post count as well. if you can consider that "good" i guess...

id always rather be doing something. internetting gets pretty boring. i hate staring at a clock.

[Cipher13]

I stay ssh'd to my home system, and irssi seems to convince them

If not, then I'll compile something random off fink.

Worst comes to worst, and I really wanna impress, I run cmatrix.