Doing nothing at work

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

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Does anyone have a job where you spend large parts of the day doing nothing?

We've got some roadworks going on outside and there's a chap who has been in his van either asleep or looking at his phone for at least 5 hours today. He's come and gone a couple of times so he's obviously waiting for something (or playing hide and seek) and hasn't just keeled over at the wheel.

I imagine it's nice getting the odd break whilst being paid, but that must get boring after a while.
 
There was a chap doing a similar job near me in his own personal AMG C63 so it can't be too badly paid either.
 
You'll often see site workers doing this, as they have to wait for JCB operators to turn up, or for council representatives to arrive and present official NRSWA parking suspensions, or any number of other things that must be in place before you can do your little bit... but you're still paid for being there at the appointed time, as it's not your fault that someone else is preventing you from working.

And yes, it is boring as hell.
 
Used to drive HGV's....often hours waiting to get loaded/unloaded at depots etc...used to try and sleep when you knew it was going to be 1hr+, just made the day seem even longer tho!
 
Office type job work from home, I get done most days between about 11am on a good day maybe half 1 in the afternoon on a bad day.

Spend the rest of the day playing pc games or sunbathing.
 
Work for a large bank, transforming it’s business operations. For most of last year I was doing 60-65 hours a week.

Currently have no clear deliverables, so basically spend my days doing nothing. Currently watching a movie. As someone who enjoys being useful, it’s actually not very fun.
 
At work, on the kiosk, sometimes I have nothing to do. Filled tobacco as best as I could, clean, read a couple of updates on company’s intranet - most aren’t irrelevant to me. As during the evenings, get fewer customers coming in and it will be even more so when it’s darker. Not allowed to leave the kiosk due to high value of tobacco and scratchcards.

Also this has reminded me that next Monday is a BH. Customers think we close at 5pm and it goes very dead as open normal hours!
 
Work from home and I'm twiddling my thumbs by 10am. Gaming PC next to me but I still get the odd phone call or email so I can't get to engrossed in anything.
Its a quiet period so its partly expected but it is very boring sitting here waiting for something to happen.
I prefer winter when I rarely have time to make a cuppa, can't stand not doing anything.
 
Bus driver here. There are shifts where I will drive a 20-30min journey then sit for upwards of 45mins, do another 20mins then sit again. There used to be a shift that every driver loved. 0630-1730 with a 2hr break in the middle, the 2nd hour was paid as company rules that your break should be a maximum of 1hr unpaid. However you drove for a total of 4hr 37mins in that 11hrs. Lots of time doing nothing.
 
BUDFORCE said:
Office type job work from home, I get done most days between about 11am on a good day maybe half 1 in the afternoon on a bad day.

Spend the rest of the day playing pc games or sunbathing.
Click to expand...

Either your job is fairly lax or you are very good at what you do! I'm an admin too, NHS, still teleworking, and us NHS admins love having the mick taken out of us being lazy jobsworths. Apparently.

Anyway, the time-critical nature of my job means that every email has to be responded to immediately, and a few minutes away from my desk guarantees several new emails and probably 1 or 2 missed calls too. This is from start to finish every day, with unfinished work rolling over due to lack of capacity.

Friday is the day when I play catch up because my clients and suppliers don't tend to ring on a Friday I treat myself to a Just-Eat which gets delivered to my door and I can get away with eating that at my desk while still working. I certainly can't get away with playing PC games or sunbathing on the job though!
 
Never really had much in the way of quiet periods/slack time in my last job. When I did have a day or two untasked, I used to clean up the lab, put all the test fixtures back where they belonged, run SW updates in all the test equipment and even cleaned the filters in the aircon pack.

When I got really bored, I got a very strong cup of coffee and spent a happy hour archiving old emails.
 
they are always digging my street up.
seems like they get a lot of free time and don't work very fast then leave the road coated in sand
 
I'm currently in a job where there can be quite a lot of downtime as the workload comes in peaks and troughs. There really isn't an awful lot to do outside of the core job and being at home during covid has meant a lot of TV watching and gaming.

If I was motivated, I could have put the time to more use and studied a qualification but meh.
 
Yep. Spent an hour surfing the internet today. Others went to Starbucks and sat in a restroom.

I'm leaving thank god, I can't stand sitting around doing nothing but I won't do stuff when others aren't doing their job either.
 
I used to have it where I'd have to drive a couple of hours to do one small job then go back but I wasn't supposed to leave site until I would have been back at a normal commuting time so there were large amounts of time just sitting in comms rooms. Got very bored and studied some more then ended up getting out of that and now rarely even get chance for a proper lunch.
 
In my old job (office admin based) we had to do a certain numbers of cases per day and we where given a certain length of time to do each one (23min I believe it was). The odd thing is, most the cases took about 5-8min to finish if you can type fast and multi-task.

I used to just speed through enough cases to finish the day and was usually finished by around 11AM (8:30am start finish at 4:30pm) not getting paid any extra for doing more than we where supposed to do so spend the majority of the day reading books. Did that for around 3 years before having to get another job (everyone was made redundant as we ran out of work to do)
 
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I work in a data centre. It’s largely like being a fireman except instead of houses/buildings and smoke/flames, it’s hardware/cabinets and component/firmware/cabling issues… and there’s virtually no fires. I did an overtime night shift yesterday and it was 12 hours of literally nothing happening.

Initially it’s great, then you realise you’re ****’ed going into another job because you’ve forgotten what work is. I’ve done a couple of courses at my desk though and plan to do one more and then hopefully do something completely different as the longer I stay there the more I can feel my brain atrophy.
 
I go around a fair few companies and hear a few stories, one of which was from someone who said they employed someone to do some IT work and they basically sat at a desk keeping themselves to themselves and surfing the web for six months before they where found out.
 
While I hate not being busy, getting to do nothing at work is a nice change from retail where you feel like you're working towards an unachievable goal. When I was back in the office we'd usually go for a long lunch, walks, or pop to the gym to pass time when it was quiet, working from home means you can do pretty much anything now, work through your watchlist, game, exercise, cook, clean, study etc. It really highlighted just how much time being physically at the office takes up.

That being said, nothing beats getting paid to take a dump at work, especially when you're on 1.5x or 2x pay :D
 
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