Taken from a much longer rant about working at Target: Then there are the attention starved wanna-be cougars who once oozed sex when they walked. Now they just ooze old make up, day old booze and something that smells faintly of moth balls while they try to get the 16 year old pimple faced teenagers to notice their pushed up old leathered milk sacks. My night is mostly spent trying to figure out if my team lead has a nice ass or whether that is sleep deprivation talking. Cuz when I'm rested it looks like a giggly mound of flesh replete with potholes and craters from some far off war lost to that last piece of cheesecake. But some nights the only thought that keeps me awake is bending her over the my little pony display in the toy section and making her neigh. Then there is this other team lead who looks like she's twelve. She's my favorite victim. I make little girl pelvis cracking/clown costume jokes at her the whole night. When she gets rowdy I ask her if its past her curfew and tell her to be a good girl if she wants another lollypop. Sometimes when she's super good I promise to give her a gold star and let her stay up an extra half hour to watch David Letterman's monologue. Basically when I look in her general direction I feel a contrary sense of both attraction and shame. If I keep working there I'm going to have to grow a fumanchu, get a van with no windows and stock up on duct tape and candy corn. Focus: How do you get yourself through work if not happily then at least without homicidal incident Alt Focus: Tell me a story about a work incident. Make me laugh.
Way to kill the thread. Focus: My job involves taking things out of boxes and repackaging them into different ones. Since it is in a warehouse there is much fun to be had. Having packaging races, Riding around on the pallet jack, screwing around with my coworkers in various ways like zip tying their legs to their chair etc.
Being a trady in the military it can be either very busy or extremely boring but a few of the ways we've dealt with down time have been to set up some stumps and play cricket inside the workshop which can get messy or start pranking each other generally the boss. One boos i had a few year ago used to be pretty cool but every now and then he would get a bit wound up until someone played a prank on him that would make him see the funny side of it and he would relax again. Some of the parnks included; - Wrapping his car with over 600m of clingfilm, - Rearranging his office on more than one occasion, - Putting Loctite 406(Real quick superglue) over his mouse, best bit about this stuff is that it stays damp a little but if it comes into contact with the skin it almost immediately sets. And there were all the usual pranks like filling putting someones coffee cup inside a bucket of water then freezing it or putting shirts and hats in the freezer wet.
When I run out of staples, I only reload one new strip even though my stapler holds two. This means I get to walk to the stationary cupboard twice as often.
My first job was at a Dunkin' Donuts, I think it was a great primer in dealing with a high volume of people in a short time span. After a while you couldn't help but get good at seeing what brought people to the store. People in uniforms for other low-level service jobs and people with forearm tattoos usually tipped well, as did cops and EMS workers because Dunkin' had a policy of comping their drinks for them. We feared people who would show up in the mid or late part of the morning dressed head to toe in black, they were usually headed for a funeral and had a tenancy to tee off on their server for the slightest mistake. Yelling at me to put more chocolate syrup in your iced latte won't bring grandpa back. In fact, are you sure you want whipped cream on that? However, funeral attendees paled in comparison to the rush we got right around 2:30, they were the Hyperbitch-Moms. You might think that you'd see them less during the summer; not for me, there were a couple of parks in the vicinity that ran day camps through the local parks department. They were easy to spot, all of them were sporting the Kate-plus-8 hedgehog cut (keep in mind this was a couple of years before the show even aired, Kate was late on that one). I usually worked the 7-3 shift and one day I had the misfortune of getting one of the Hyperbitch-Moms at 2:55. She ordered a caramel iced latte and I made it in great time except for one problem, the restaurant-style ketchup bottles that we kept the caramel in was jammed. I was at an impasse, I could either take the top off of the bottle and gently pour caramel into the drink or squeeze the bottle really hard in an attempt to shoot the crusty old caramel out of the nozzle. A smart person would have chose the former option, I am not a smart person. I set my stance and squeezed the bottle between the heels of my palms. I was hoping I would get a champagne bottle pop followed by a smooth stream of caramel. I did get a pop, the entire top of the bottle popped off unleashing a full container's worth of caramel onto my crotch. I tried to wipe it up while the Hyperbitch-Mom screamed at me. It was no use, my pants were coated in stickyness. I ducked into the back room and recruited a guy that just got in for the evening shift to deal with her. I could hear her yelling at him as I tried to get a handle on the mess. I left through the back door that day.
I get through my job by sticking it to the man. I clock in with an extra 15 to 20 minutes early, and clock out 5-10 minutes late. This adds up to an extra few bucks a week, usually around 45. I of course don't do work during this time. I wander around, get a soda, shoot the shit. I also try and time my shits to be on company time. These shits are quite long. My position means I am constantly going from my desk to the machining shop and repair areas. This means no one knows what I am doing, and if I am wandering around I might be getting a consult, or looking for a tool, or trying to solve a problem. Usually I am wandering for the sake of wandering. I have also discovered that our server room is nice and warm. Kind of like being back in the womb. When IT is out, it is a good place to take a nap.
Pooping and Pranks. I drink extra coffee just to make myself poop more, thus spending another 15 minutes in Graceland. As far as pranks, I love playing pranks on people. The Office has been such a great resource for this. So has Think Geek. I have the Annoy-A-Tron (beeps randomly every 2-8 minutes) and the Phantom Keystroker (random keys, phrases and mouse movements on a co-workers computer). Oh, and I LOVE scaring people who are far too involved in their work. I have the Maverick which can be too much fun to play with. Sneak up behind someone, shoot past their head and to their computer screen. It scares the bejeesus out of someone. I've been reported to HR because of this. Twice.
I mostly daydream. Most days, it's a day dream wherein I live in a warm locale. I dream of playing golf in the morning, and having time to spend with my wife, lounging over coffee and a paper. I take my dog for a nice long walk. I breath easier. I breath freer. It feels wonderful. In this daydream, I'm writing for a living, doing something I love. Sometimes I daydream about the sweet release of death, and there's a comfort in knowing that when I'm dead, this will all be over. When I'm not daydreaming, I tend to read websites, or think of ways to get rich quick so I can quit.
At my last job, they thought it was a good idea to allow employees to fill out their own time sheets on Excel. There was no oversight. I came in 30 minutes late, left an hour early, and so on, and then just filled out my timesheet as if I was on time. Not every day, but on days I knew I could get away with it without it affecting my work (read: hungover). Along the same lines, I'd run errands during the day. About half my time was spent in the field and about half in the office, so I could slip out whenever I wanted without anyone questioning me. I'd go to the used bookstore down the road, the coffee shop for a sitdown drink while reading a magazine, the bank, etc. I worked exceptionally fast -- sometimes twice as fast as my colleagues, no exaggeration -- so no one ever noticed. My share of the work still got done. This all kind of evened out, though. The hours were crazy and we weren't allowed overtime because the company couldn't afford it, but the nature of the job wasn't that we could just say OK, no overtime, we're out of here. The work had to be done, and it had to be done on a daily deadline. I don't feel bad for being the slacker I sound like above, because I put in my share of 12 and 13 hour days without being paid past the eighth hour. All of my in-office work was done writing page after page in Microsoft Word, too. If I was done for the day or killing time between assignments, I'd write short stories. Some of my best work was done in full view of my boss and my boss' boss. To them, it looked exactly like I was working.
The best slacker games at any job had to be for bar work. I barbacked so we usually just fucked around with the cool bartenders. I never drank much on the job but there was always someone willing to feed you drinks if you wanted. A couple of bartenders at the last gig I had would play, who could make more ice down girls shirts and then get them to flash us. The rest of the time when it wasn't busy we'd just hit on girls. Working at bars is one of the coolest jobs out there. The other big game I remember playing was when I worked for a chili restaurant. We'd break dollars with the waitresses and then we'd all get in a circle and gamble with the quarters. Basically we just flipped them and odd man out won the round. We used to spend hours doing this. You never really won more than four or five bucks but it was more about wasting time.
We play trivia games. Seriously. I work retail so when we get everything done for the day and just have to wait around and help customers until we can close, we play trivia games. We even keep running totals up in the back room. We use to watch movies, but they took away our tv....
On that note, we do the same thing too over email, except with baseball and football stats. It gets pretty ridiculous how good some of my friends are. Baseball Reference, and Pro Football Reference are our friends. For example, this one should be pretty obvious based off one stat. It's all about finding the correct stat for each person.. (we also make sure to cut out teams, positions, numbers, etc..) Spoiler Tony Dorsett - 99 yard long rush against the Vikings is the key stat.
A couple years ago I used to work at my school's gym doing general bitch work (equipment maintenance, drawing field lines, power washing, etc). Besides hiding in the stockrooms to avoid work, our particular favorite diversion was to hop into one of the gigantic dryers we used for drying members' towels. A person would brace themselves against the walls inside the spinning tunnel, while another would be outside and man the controls. Sometimes the guy on the outside would forget to turn the heat off and the inside guy would end up getting burned. These escapades stopped when some guy couldn't take it and threw up all over the inside of the huge dryer, which was nearly impossible to clean out.
Every summer in college I worked with a couple buddies for the ship repair company that I now work at as a real, meaningful employee/manager. The first legs of my summer employment stint were spent as a shop bitch. The shop is pretty good sized, but the real fun was the fenced in lay down area for all our massive equipment outside - it was about 2 acres, and provided plenty of shit to do. My personal favorite: stick rock. This simply involved finding roughly a 2' long x 4" wide flat piece of wood (almost always a piece of a broken pallet), and tossing a good sized gravel rock into the air and hitting it as far as you could. Typically the goal was to hit it over the fence and into one of the surrounding yards/houses in the neighborhood outside the fence. (Don't worry about the damage to the houses because they all belong to welfare cases, so I pay for them anyway). Stick rock eventually evolved into a game where one person actually pitched a rock to another person acting as a batter, who was now weilding a staging strut (about 3' long, 3" diameter piece of hollowed steel tubing) in lieu of the broken pallet fragment. This was all pretty fun until the pitcher took a comebacker about a cetimeter above his eyeball, and needed a few stiches. Real sketchy trying to create a legitimate explanation for how that happened. We also had a game where we stood about 10 ft away from an aftercooler and tossed circular gaskets onto the aftercooler valves. This probably doesn't make any sense to any of you, but it was basically an industrialized version of ring-toss. Since the results of this game were quantifiable, we typically put money on it. There was always some fun to be had in fucking with the hornets out there as well. They liked to nest in the tubes of the aforementioned struts. We would often times spray paint them - that really pissed them off, ya know, until they died. We would also WD-40 them. This is fun, because it doesn't kill them, it just makes their wings freeze so they can't fly away. I mean, who doesn't have fun wrapping a t-shirt around your head, running up to a nest of wasps wildly spraying some sort of aersol venom, and then flagrantly running away screaming and yelling like little girl? And of course I couldn't forget an all time classic: "Fucking shit up with the forklift." We had a huge forklift, and I would take liberties to fuck up random things I could find that obviously didn't belong to, or were of little value to the company. One time I destroyed a perfectly fine bicycle which was back there for some unknown reason. I actually got into trouble for that one - I guess it belonged to someone or something. I wasn't really paying attention during my reprimand. Oh yea - on a more boring note: When it was raining, and there was no reason to be ouside, I got really good at balancing shop push brooms straight up in the air on my chin. I could fuckin run around the place at a sprint, and even do a side shuffle without that thing falling off. Once time the receptionist came into the shop for some reason and saw that, and she literally spit out whatever she was drinking because she started laughing so hard. Then once I got sent out of the shop to do actual labor in the shipyard, I would always be the only white guy on my crew of unskilled laborers. Then I could pass my time by trying to understand what the fuck my co-workers were saying. It was either black guys talking in the most butchered form of ebonics imaginable(No - I seriously didn't know what they were saying), or a crew of Mexicans (Not Texicans - but sneak over the border, we all have the same social security number, Mexicans). Either way, I would just caption their talk noises in my own head with ludicrous and impossible conversations that I found to be pleasing and entertaining to myself.
I'm a salaried employee so I stick it to the man by showing up a few minutes late and leaving a few minutes early. I also spend enough time in the bathroom that I refer to it as my other office.
I keep telling myself I'll never grow up to be as stupid as the parents who ride the rides here... yes, I'm a ride jockey at a theme park. One day I was working the paddle boats, and I loaded a family with a 5-year-old son onto a boat as per the norm. Then a few minutes later I hear the kid singing "I'm on a Boat". A few of the teenagers around their boat joined in, and it continued from there. We got most everyone on and waiting in line for the ride to sing it. Minus expletives of course, so I wouldn't get my ass fired. Made my summer, and I got an employee spirit award for it. For all the dipshits I run into, I love my job.
Oh, this thread is for me. Before I started working from home (where dicking off directly affects my paycheck, so it isn't awesome AT ALL) I used to have a plethora of ways to keep myself occupied at work. Here is what I can remember: --Elaborate sexual assumptions about all of my coworkers or customers. If I worked with you, I imagined what you looked like naked....a lot. Even if you were ugly. Or fat. Or gross. And I also imagined what kind of sex you had, what positions you had it in, what your face might look like mid-orgasm, etc. Sometimes, the results skeeved me out to the point where I couldn't talk to that person for days without wanting to immediately barf. --TiB/ Fail blog/ STFU parents/ Jezebel/ travian.com/ Desktop Tower Defense/ Digg/ Youtube. If it wasn't blocked, I went there. Repeatedly. --Coloring. I would make very, very detailed pictures using office highlighters, pens, and color printers. Some of the MS Paint drawings I made had over 45 colors...all of which I printed from the office printer and then immediately discarded. Unless it was cool--then my boyfriend got to display it on his fridge. --Staple wars. Always a good time. --Like someone else said, print off books/poems/blog posts/crossword puzzles/Sudoku and quietly read/fill them in at your desk. --File my nails. Reapply my lipstick. Wash my hands and then put hand lotion on them. Powder my face. Water my office plants. Make a fresh pot of coffee. Wipe down all of my desk/cubicle surfaces with antibacterial wipes. Refresh my stores of office supplies. E-mail my parents. Text underneath my desk. Dump out my purse, organize the contents. Fake a computer problem, walk to IT and flirt with the monkies. Wipe down their desks, make them a fresh pot of coffee. --Lists. Lots of lists. Groceries, to-do, goals for this week, goals for this month, things my mother might want for her birthday. Looking at this list, it really seems like there is no way I could've gotten any work done. But based on the glowing recommendations from my former employers, I guess I am just a really efficient paper machine.
Being self-employed usually rocks. I usually work from home, so wake up when I wake up, hardly ever get dressed up more than a comfortable set of sweats, full access/use of a gourmet kitchen for breakfast/lunch/etc, monster fridge stocked with refreshing drinks, etc. My office is set up and designed by me, to be PERFECT for my work. And it has a window overlooking a lake. And when I need a break, I go and fish on my lake. Mind you, for almost a year now, I've had to spend the vast majority of my work-day in a cube farm for 9-5 crap. HATE IT. In that case, I drink too much coffee and go sit in the john with my iPhone playing Tower Madness. I'm now ranked 7th in the world on some levels.
Focus: I'm an escort, so my work hours are quite limited, but appointments often seem to drag on. My only option is to close my eyes and tell myself that the money's worth losing my dignity and letting some creeper lick my armpits while jerking off for an hour. Alt. Focus: Another girl at my agency left an open bag of potato chips in the kitchen cabinet at our incall, resulting in an ant infestation. After an appointment yesterday, I tried to kill off some of the ants myself since our house mom hasn't been able to get maintenance to come over yet. In my mind, the best way to do this was set the bag of chips on fire in the sink while torching all the other ants crawling the walls and counters with a grill lighter. All while naked. It only got embarrassing when our security guy walked in just as the smoke detectors went off.