Those at work, or just insanely bored. Or both.

[harner]

Ever fall into the trap of watching the clock every 15 seconds? Man, not even lunch yet and I'm going insane.

[fingal]

Ever fall into the trap of watching the clock every 15 seconds? Man, not even lunch yet and I'm going insane.

I actually changed jobs for that reason! In one job I did virtually nothing for a 3 month stretch ... Then I decided that this was getting me nowhere and I left. One of the senior managers warned me about going; the 'don't rock the boat' attitude. That just made me want to leave even more. Leaving is always more fun than arriving.

[techieMoe]

My work tends to come in spurts, so yes. In the middle of a week-long dry spell where I'm given little menial tasks at sporadic intervals that really don't require a lot of thought, I have been known to stare blankly at the wall behind my computer monitors with such intensity that people have to raise their voices to get my attention.

[harner]

Sounds like a touch of ADD. I try to make myself a to-do list, which I accomplish by like 10AM. I start at 8.

What do you do these days, Fingal, and Moe?

[fingal]

Sounds like a touch of ADD. I try to make myself a to-do list, which I accomplish by like 10AM. I start at 8.

What do you do these days, Fingal, and Moe?

It takes a while to explain what I do, so I'll keep it simple. I provide access to information about social housing, working with backend website tools: mainly Lotus Notes. I'm not a Notes developer however.

Social housing is more or less a 'soft science' here in the UK, but very valuable in social terms. I deal with information as capital. That's a close approximation: more would be a bore!

[harner]

Haha it sounds pretty interesting. We're hiring a Lotus Notes admin right now, actually. I hope you can stay busy over there!

[bigtomrodney]

Mine can go very quiet. It goes from 0-60 in no time. I was doing so much webbrowsing for a while that I felt guilty about it, even though I was doing nothing wrong. I found a way to get over the guilt. I'm using Ghostzilla so that noone knows I'm surfing. It's only for passers by from busier departments. I'm sure they wouldn't like to be told my slack period was authorised.

[techieMoe]

What do you do these days, Fingal, and Moe?

I'm about equal parts Java Programmer and DB2 database administrator. My workload is pretty evenly split between the two. I'm the odd duck in my team (the Data Management team), because most of them either program in legacy languages (Model 204 User Language, COBOL, CICS) or work entirely with data (such as our incredibly smart main database admin).

I handle table redefines, backups, migrations from one database region to the other on the data side, but I also get little "pet" projects from my boss such as "We need a program to do this, this, and this. Write one for me." Those are done in Java. I'm the only one on my team with Java expertise, but we all share our DB2 knowledge.

Currently my big project is converting several small specialty applications into DB2/Java. The existing apps rely on a proprietary screen-scraping application that is notoriously unreliable and very expensive to maintain, so we're moving all the programs it hosts off of it so we can shut it down for good. It should save my department a pretty significant amount of money from maintenance fees alone. Unfortunately since I work for the government, I won't be seeing any of that money.

That might have just bored you more than you already were.

[harner]

Good reading material. It gave me something to look forward to prior to lunch. I just got out of college and I started my Internship last week. I've basically been given about 8 projects which are Linux-related. I haven't been too hardcore with Linux in quite some time, so getting thrown back into it was a culture shock at first. Now I just accept it as part of my job.
Right now I'm working with Moodle, Open Audit, and Tripwire.
Technically, right now I'm working on looking busy and overhearing the subcontracted Dell guys in the cube next to me.

[CodeRoot]

It goes from 0-60 in no time.

An interesting paradoxical statement...