Office jobs

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

I currently have a job where I have to constantly stand for seven hours. Lately I have had the pleasure of doing that in the pouring rain. Entirely coincidentally I feel like punching RoJoHen in the face.

Enjoy it while you can and be thankful you don't have one of those office jobs where you are already overworked and then suddenly the company gets the wonderful idea that one person could just as easily do the work two people used to do if they "just worked smarter, not harder".

And yeah where the fuck do you work and are they hiring?

 

[JoeZhang]

You have been given a beautiful opportunity - if you have time on your hands, have a look at how your place currently operates and see if you can come up with ways of improving it - then try and work out who would listen to your idea.

Or alternatively play video games.

 

[Jadzia]

I mean, it's a solid paycheck, and it's a lot less annoying than my previous job bartending at TGI Fridays, but good lord, I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with myself. I got 80% of today's work done yesterday!

Every morning you pass by those mail sacks in the lobby, which you've noticed steadily growing by about 3 sacks each day. You don't know what they are there for, and you've thought nothing of them.

Come friday your boss will come to you and ask how you're getting on processing the orders, and after exchanging a few words you'll suddenly realise those mail sacks were for you to work through.

Dare you speak the words "Nobody told me!" thereby confessing that you've done almost nothing all week, or do you grit your teeth and say "It's all in hand" and try to work through 15 sacks of mail in one day?

 

[RoJoHen]

What is it you're supposed to be doing, theoretically? What's your job?

I'm an admissions advisor for a local college. I am supposed to be meeting with prospective students and getting them enrolled in our programs. I make phone calls to set up appointments.

I get bored because 1) these people don't show up for their scheduled appointments, and 2) most of their phones have be disconnected or go straight to voicemail, so I can't set up more appointments.

 

[Yeoman Randi]

My sympathies Rojo. I worked in a two person office for 8 fucking years. Me and the boss. In a small room. OMG, ask me how much THAT job sucked! And the last two or so years the business was in a serious decline, so i had to look busy because there WAS no work to do. So i invented things to do which were pretty silly. It really does suck. SORRY!

 

[Shazam!]

I have an office job. Yeah, it can be quite dull sometimes and my immediate co-workers are all female and not really the sort who would appreciate a "Who's better? Kirk or Picard!" conversation. However, the blonde's ass is terrific.

 

[Starbreaker]

I want your job

 

[LitmusDragon]

At least they aren't inventing busy work for you to do yet. That's one of my pet peeves. If I'm going to toil away at something I'd at least like it to be for some useful purpose.

 

[nevermore]

I'm an admissions advisor for a local college.

Oooh, academic jobs are the best. Usually, your employment contract includes the requirement that you be permitted to take courses. My University offers a wide variety of software, design and other career/skill development courses that are one or two days of classroom instruction, as well as a ton of online stuff you can do from your office. Look into those to kill time. You probably also get tuition remission for degree programs, so look and see if there's anything you would want to pursue.

 

[WillsBabe]

I get bored because 1) these people don't show up for their scheduled appointments, and 2) most of their phones have be disconnected or go straight to voicemail, so I can't set up more appointments.

I work with people who don't turn up for appointments. I have a couple of tips. Text them before hand to remind them of the appointment. Always send a text to communicate. Young people often have little credit to pick up voicemails but will usually always get a text. Make sure you book appointments close together so that if people don't come in it won't be long before the next appointment. Your success rate will be higher.

 

[Gryffindorian]

I'm sure many people who work in an office environment will agree with you, Rojo. But depending on the nature of one's organization and job title, the workload varies. I've been with my employer for 12+ years now, and although I can't say I love my job, I'm quite content with it. Maybe I've gotten so jaded over the years. Seriously, I like working with the people in my department (most of them anyway), and I like the sense of teamwork. I've got no complaints about the pay and benefits, so for now I'm just grateful I have this job.

I work from 8 to 4:30, and things start to wind down around 2 p.m., which is when I usually schedule all my personal/medical appointments. So occasionally, I just check my FB account and surf the Web when I have some downtime. I also like to get out and take a walk around the block to get some air and stretch my legs.

 

[AdAstra]

Oh wow, I have an office job and I'm always superbusy...

I've been in the situation where I had practically nothing to do, and I played board-games with my colleagues, but that's so long ago already. Ever since, I've been swamped constantly...

Wanna switch for a while?

 

[TheBrew]

Yeah, I end up doing 1-2 hours of work a day on average and I am a network engineer. I just spend my time reading and studying. When I think that I would like a more interesting day, I realize that it involves the servers crashing and people going apeshit. Then I go back to being happy that everything runs smoothly here.

 

[Bears Discover Fire]

Hurry up and wait.

That sums up the work load of my job, more or less.

My company has hung in there through the recession, but business is bad and not improving, though we are supposedly in recovery.

My workload depends on how motivated/how many salespeople are on a given day. Right now, we are understaffed and under motivated, and morale in general is shitty here, so I have on average about 3-4 hours of actual work to do and 4-5 hours of squat.

"On average" being a key phrase. Some days, I'm lucky to recieve 2 projects the whole day (about 10 min a piece). Less occasionally, I'm suddenly, totally overwhelmed. The latter happens around the end of the month, when our clients renew their accounts with us, but other than that there seems to be no set pattern to the work load.

I created a busywork project for myself, cleaning up the client data base. 7 hours a day of copy/paste is stupefying boring, but it gives me the appearance of looking efficent.

About two weeks ago, my manager pulled another employee off an ongoing sourcing/content project and gave it to me, in an attempt to reallocate our human capital. So, I'm doing another copy/paste project for 5 hours a day that's not even part of my regular duties, but am still left with too much time on my hands more often than not.

Efficiency is great in theory, sometimes it's counterproductive in practice.

I feel like my brain is totally atrophying here, I can feel my cognitive functions taking a dump daily.

 

[Holdfast]

When I was in that sort of work, I just left the office when I had nothing to do. I got to know the local cafes, parks, galleries, shops, etc, etc very well. Just take your phone with you so you're contactable. As long as the work gets done, and you keep on good terms with everyone in the office (bring them back food, flowers or other treats from your little outings), no-one really cares.

If you have a boss who actually bothers about time-at-desk rather than whether the job is being done, my advice would be to find a more sensible employer.

In the end, however, no matter how one fills the dead diary space, it's still frustrating to have nothing to do and yet still be "on the clock". I eventually changed my lifestyle to avoid that sort of work; now when I work, I get paid for what I actually do rather than the hours I work. I work about a quarter of the hours I used to, and have a similar salary. If you're a self-motivated person and don't mind uncertainty, see whether you can work towards that sort of career instead.

 

[RoJoHen]

I'm an admissions advisor for a local college.

Oooh, academic jobs are the best. Usually, your employment contract includes the requirement that you be permitted to take courses. My University offers a wide variety of software, design and other career/skill development courses that are one or two days of classroom instruction, as well as a ton of online stuff you can do from your office. Look into those to kill time. You probably also get tuition remission for degree programs, so look and see if there's anything you would want to pursue.

It's not really that kind of school. We don't have individual classes. It's a vocational school, and if you sign up for one of our programs, you have to attend Monday-Friday for 9 months. Not exactly the kind of place where I could just sign up for a random class.

I get bored because 1) these people don't show up for their scheduled appointments, and 2) most of their phones have be disconnected or go straight to voicemail, so I can't set up more appointments.

I work with people who don't turn up for appointments. I have a couple of tips. Text them before hand to remind them of the appointment. Always send a text to communicate. Young people often have little credit to pick up voicemails but will usually always get a text. Make sure you book appointments close together so that if people don't come in it won't be long before the next appointment. Your success rate will be higher.

Young people are not exactly our target audience. The majority of the students in our programs are in their 30s and 40s and are looking for a fresh start at life. Many of them are poor and don't have cell phones, let alone texting. Hell, half of them don't even pay the bills for their landlines, so half the calls I make are to disconnected numbers.

 

[milo bloom]

Missed this thread earlier, my work history started in my teens at McDonald's where I learned that the general public is full of horrible nasty people. And they vote.

In my early 20's, the wife and I threw everything in a truck and moved from Kentucky to the Chicago suburbs and we started looking for work through temp agencies. At first, it was just to get a paycheck rolling. The second place I went to (back in 1997) was an office job that somehow clicked with me and I'm still here now.

You have been given a beautiful opportunity - if you have time on your hands, have a look at how your place currently operates and see if you can come up with ways of improving it - then try and work out who would listen to your idea.

[Dr. Evil] Riiiiight[/Dr. Evil]
A couple years after I started here (over 10 years ago), they launched an in-house designed new piece of software for us to do all our work in. I immediately pointed out every single flaw, especially the ones that made the new system harder to use than the older one.

It's been in the last few years that they've started paying attention to me.

Or alternatively play video games.

Scrabble on the iPhone in the breakroom (sounds like a Clue solution).


But yeah, I prefer an office job. I still have to deal with a lot of customer service stuff, but unlike the McDonald's type of customer service, in this job you're dealing with vendors and business customers that have some inkling of how the process works (though, of course, they still ask for the impossible, it's just easier to explain to them why they're not getting it.)

One thing I do is keep a small cup (instead of a large canteen) on my desk for water. Makes me get up and walk around and talk to my subordinates more often on the way to the breakroom.

 

[Colonel Green]

Wow, that sounds wonderful!

I've worked for the (provincial) government for the last 4 years and I am ALWAYS run off my feet. I skip my breaks and even lunch, but I rarely manage to catch up. Beyond that I often put in 10-15 hours of overtime every week. So much for the notion of private sector effiency