When you have nothing to do at work (part I)

What do you do when you have nothing to do at work? Leaving seems like the most reasonable solution, but what if, just what if your boss needs you to send that one email at some point in the next four hours? No, you cannot leave - that is the worst possible solution.

Recently, I've found myself workless at work. Mostly due to the fact that my boss has been away for a while, but even now that she's back I still find myself reading Thought Catalog, nodding and silently repeating, "Yes, yes that is exactly how I feel. You said it spot on, yes," while clicking around on my other two monitors every once in a while so that they don't assume screensaver mode.

As I do this, I tell myself that I should probably politely interrupt my boss and ask if there is anything she needs help with. But no, I can't - it's much too far into the work day and if I ask now she will know that I've been doing nothing all day. And no, I cannot ask because I am afraid that the answer will be 'yes,' it will be 'yes, Amanda why don't you go through all the documents in our database and make them pretty,' 'yes, go ahead and analyze the traffic metrics and present your findings nicely via spreadsheet.' These are my fears. But, then I'm trapped in this paradox of being workless at work. Do you feel bad like I feel bad when you think about how you're getting paid to do the same things you do at home when you're lounging around in your underwear with a bowl of cheese puffs stuck orbiting your gravitational field?

I don't want to do work, but yes I do - it hurts to do nothing and it makes every minute feel like six hours. That's a 2880 hour work day! Oh work gods give me work, let me sip from your good goblet of labor, let me have purpose in this corporate life of gray cubes and fax machines. And the moment the work gods grant you your stupid wish, you sulk and yearn for the purgatory of furtive internet browsing and dicking around. Which leads me to another point: dicking around in secrecy hurts terribly. It is an activity that should be executed freely, openly, expressively. But in the cube, where the walls are in all the wrong places and there is nowhere you can place your monitor without someone seeing the horrid non-work things on your screen, dicking around becomes unbearable. Reading an article about how to make your Mondays better in fragments hurts and you apologize to it like, "Sorry I cannot enjoy you fully and appreciate your humor completely because I have to hide you behind a spreadsheet."

But as all things go, when you're clicking and scrolling around with your eyes glazed over, you will, at 5:00 pm if you're lucky, hear a little sigh from your boss and she'll say, 'time for me to head home.' These magical words will perk your ears and you'll look up like a crazed mutt with a bacon milkbone dangling above his head, try to bid her goodnight without drooling or sounding possessed, and as her footsteps pitter patter away, you'll fantasize about all the wondrous dicking around you will do in the comfort of home, in your underwear, with your cheese puffs. This is what happens when you have nothing to do at work, which happens never, so bugger off!