Slashdot Mirror
Down Time At Work — What Do You Do?
An anonymous reader writes "I work in IT and find fairly often that I have 'down time.' I'll usually browse the web (Slashdot) or try to find something informative or educating to read. Sometimes, I even get caught up working on my personal webpage or other project that isn't exactly work related. What does everyone else do during these times, and how much time do they spend on non-work related things while at work?"
...is a very serious sport.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Documentation documentation documentation and more documentation. I always bitch I never have enough time for documentation and then I find myself trolling /.
It's not the most fun thing to do but it certainly something that can always keep you busy and you can never have too much of it as long as it is well written AND well organized.
"Keep at least 3-6 full bottles of hard alcohol on hand, a 2 week resignation notice,..." - Poetmatt
I could have sworn I heard somebody say something from underneath my bosses desk...
Hmmm...
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
That's right, I go take a three hour shit (at a minimum). I bring some reading material and I challenge myself to see how long I can stay in there before my I lose all feeling in my legs and have to leave.
It's better than surfing the web or doing personal stuff at your desk because you could never be fired for taking too long to shit; that would be discrimination.
I'll just start doing whatever gets modded highest here.
I did that until I perfected myself and my work environment. Now I wander around the office improving other people.
I get myself a coffee and go looking for a coworker with an imminent deadline, and have a chat, asking thing like "How was your holiday" or things like that.
Evil, I know. But it's still funny.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Downtime is for those projects that nobody will officially let you start, nobody "wants" and nobody will pay you to implement. Then, when you spend all that downtime putting it in, you pretend that you did it in your own time alongside your normal work, and people suddenly discover that all the projects that they considered a waste of time become something that they can't live without.
At least, that's how it's worked everywhere I've ever been employed.
For example, in a Windows-only school at which the only person who'd ever heard of Linux (the IT manager) treated mention of it like some kind of first word from a child ("Oh, you use Linux. That's cute. Tell me when you make something 'useful' out of it."), I had a few hours of downtime. Found a spare "obsolete" PC. Found a couple of network cards. Was tired of the "Linux being nothing more than a toy" digs.
In three hours (including install, configuration and a lot of testing) I implemented a caching, transparent proxy/filter which to this day is still filtering the Internet (with zero configuration changes either on the clients, servers or any other devices) for over a thousand users without anybody noticing any difference and saving the school in question several thousand pounds on buying their own filtering appliance (from the prices we were quoted). I implemented it in an afternoon and it went into full live service when school finished that day and is still there churning away. It's zero-maintenance (unless someone wants a particular website blocked, in which case they just stick its name into a plain text file), "invisible" to the network users so, unlike some of the other network equipment, the kids don't try to "hack" it and even if they do only the squid port actually does anything.
It's never been rebooted, never caused a problem, is the only thing standing between the kids and the nasty side of the Internet, is now the de facto and only Internet filtering within the school and if it ever "breaks" it has a Cat5-coupler taped to it with instructions - couple the "In" Ethernet cable to the "Out" cable and, without doing anything else, you bypass the filter without anyone noticing more than a seconds downtime. Obviously, it's in a secured cabinet so that only the IT manager can do that, but the demonstration of "now we're filtered, *click*, now we're not, *click*, now you're running off my proxy, *click*, now it's all back how it was before today, *click*"... was enough to silence the Linux-critic once and for all.
Then there's the school running a Jabber IM system that they "would never use". Then there's the school running the PHP helpdesk for which they had no use. Then there's the one whose IT department are running their own recording CCTV computer which nobody but the IT department know about, which emails them movies of any movement in the IT office overnight or when nobody is supposed to be in - it's already caught several "wanderers" who just happened to walk through the locked IT office when they had no need to and "just looked" at the pile of laptops hidden away. That system later got re-used to record classes for approximately £500 less per camera then our usual CCTV supplier.
All the best projects are done when you let the people who know how just let loose with their own ideas and not worry about whether the end product will be useful. Downtime is perfect for this and turns the most boring moments into the most interesting, especially if you have a large IT team who can all "show off" to each other.
Is that code for eating doughnuts? If so, I am a topology master.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
This is why I spend my "down-time" scripting away my job to generate more down-time.