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Admin
So that's why unemployment is going down. I've been wondering :-)
Admin
> we had to install a screen saver preventer here to allow a third party app to run.
Uh, what about just disabling the screen saver ?
Admin
I'd hazard a guess at group policies being in place disabling the screensaver tab/control panel. Is the case here, too.
Admin
A good portion of my summer job as a web developer was like this. We only had one website and the work they hired me for only took four days (took the previous three students three years and was a mess that I immediately rewrote). They were excited to see it finished so quickly, but then they had nothing for me to do for nearly a month. I came up with a few good ideas; putting everything into CVS, documenting what was there, etc. Then I read Wikipedia. After awhile, I started bringing textbooks and reading them. Eventually, I became a regular on digg. The worst days were when there wasn't enough new material on digg to keep me interested.
After over a month they finally came up with a new project: redesign the entire website (a new look was coming down from the big wigs). Of course, everything had to be checked over, and the lady in charge of this was already ridiculously busy. I usually coded for a couple of hours, then twiddled thumbs for the rest of the day, until we could meet and go over the changes for next day.
The worst part was, I was on contract for it all. Of course, the contract was based on 40 hours a week for 4 months. Since the job they actually hired me for was the first four days of work, it rattled me to no end that I couldn't just go home and take the money. I didn't have to come in to work, but I was still getting paid by the hour.
Now that the website is done, guess what I'm doing now? That's right; getting paid to do homework.
Admin
The real WTF is that so many people have so little to do! At my company, programmers are working 10-12 hour days, weekend, etc. and cannot keep up with the volume of work required.
Admin
I'm willing to bet it was a classified environment.
1. It's worth hiring that TS worker even if you don't have anything for him to do 'cause the government is paying for that slot.
2. Stupid security measures (15 minute session timeout) are par for the course.
3. And, there might not have been an internet connection (or for that matter a development environment).
Admin
My current job's a bit of a do nothing job. Trouble is, I made it that way. It's at a school, and when I started there, it was Win98, no real restrictions, all students used the same account, etc... Now it's like a stable enterprisey restricted setup, so nothing tends to fail. Mostly I just reset passwords and change toner cartridges.
That said, some of my job is restricted by my employer (the state government's education department). They often announce projects stating they will be doing xyz very soon, which causes me to not bother with my existing similar project, but then they delay theirs. Currently I'm waiting on at least 2 projects to start, with no actual info or dates. They simply ignore emails sent by anyone and there's no published docs beyond end user docs for most stuff...
Admin
ChiefCrazyTalk, eh? Sounds like someone I know.
Admin
Sounds like what my job turned into when all the money dried up and the developer was laid off but they still needed someone who knew the system to come in once a week to make sure things still worked. I was happy to return to college just to have something to do during the day.
Admin
cconroy wrote the following post at 11-13-2006 4:43 PM:
Fischer-priceless?Admin
yes! i love it!
Admin
See above for the #1 reason I develop on and work with Unix systems. I would rather dig ditches than be chained to such idiocy. Such a thing would never be tolerated in any Unix/Linux department I have ever seen.
BTW, there is a certain macabre quality to that description above. I keep thinking of our hapless castaways in the show "Lost", who have to enter 4 8 15 16 23 42 into some mysterious underground computer every 45 minutes or the world will end.
Admin
Admin
With all the "dumb manager" stories that usually appear here, this is a real heart-warmer.
Admin
I almost spit a coffee on my LCD..
Admin
Oh my dear lord....
Although I've had to come up with similar ideas, the best ever yet is my nostromo n52 usb game controller, lets you macro stuff... Which is why my WoW character looks a little left and right every 10 seconds or so while I'm smoking :)
CAPTCHA: bedtime - its way past mine
Admin
.. .what took you so long? ;-)
Reading all the replies, i realize my current assignment has a nice chance to mutate into something like this. F'thagn, these places really steal the dream out of your life. Thank you, alex, for giving us this WTF. Praise also has to go the original 'suffering imp'(tm) for endurance and to his manager for creativity.
And alex, would you mind if i, äh, borrow the story and fax it to HR to drive home a point?
capcha: whiskey well, that would help?
PS: honing your skills is the way to go, imho. I currently busy myself learning russian :-)
Admin
The problem with jobs like that is that you do stuff like reading digg all day... so when you come home there is nothing fancy entertaining thing left.. Sometimes you need to do sports or go to your girlfriend earlier just because you have post-whored in every imaginable forum all day long already.
Admin
I weep./
Admin
Seconded.
Admin
Ok... after about an hour of doing that crap, I would have put all my idle energy into creating a better solution than an egg timer and staring off into space. The vibrating chair is clever and all, but even before I finished reading the post I already was thinking one word... AutoIt.
Admin
STAND UP OVATION ! The WTF of the year, really i laugheds to tears, and could not help but print the article to show everybody around !
A Windows laptop : $1000
A wireless keyboard : $50
An optical trackball : $40
Reading theDailyWTF : PRICELESS !!!!!!!!!
Admin
Simpsons did it!
Admin
The real WTF is why they didn't automate the report on the server side... (yes, it can be done on Windows too...)
Captcha: clueless? Me?
Admin
(Bolded the important part) Sadly, yes they do. A company typically owns the rights to a developer's inventions because most people just sign the NDA and other forms to get the job. I did, and I'm not even a developer, but any "inventions" I create while on the clock are owned by my company. It only makes sense though, since I'm using their office, their computer equipment, and their network connections to do anything on the Internet while getting paid from 8-5.
Thankfully I've never been stuck in a situation as ridiculous as Ryan's though!
Admin
I did a consulting gig with a large ISP (more of a BBS, actually) back in the early '90s. I was responsible for the build process for a large project (US income tax software, federal and state). Of course, the federal tax was handled by one executable, and each individual state with income tax got it's own .EXE - a lot of apps.
During early development, the build process took hours and hours. I came on shift at 6:00PM, and worked until the build was complete or when I was relieved by my day-shift counterpart at 6:00AM; if there was a problem that kept the build from finishing, I had to stay until it was fixed and the build completed. It was a 7 day of the week process; I billed a minimum of 84 hours a week, and there were weeks that I worked in excess of 100 hours.
As the project got closer to being finished, though, and the individual state tax software was completed and frozen, the build process took fewer and fewer hours. It got to the point where I would start the build around 8:00PM and it would finish before 11:00PM.
I talked to the project manager and mentioned that I was spending lots of hours doing nothing while waiting to be relieved in the morning, and suggested that I go home after the build finished. He said no, that I had to stay until I was relieved. I offered to go home when the build was done and return before 6:00AM to meet the day shift; he said no.
I asked him what he wanted me to do after the build was done each night. His response was that he didn't care, as long as I was there until the day shift arrived. He suggested that I read a book, or bring in my own laptop and work on other projects, or play a game.
Did anyone ever use the multiple monitor support in the original DOOM? You could set a monitor on either side of your main one, and start a separate DOOM game on each of the three PCs. With the right command-line options on each of the machines, you got a 3D-type game (the side monitors provided peripheral vision type views). I would go in every night, do the build, drag a couple of other machines over to my desk, play DOOM for four or five hours, rearrange the desks, read a book, work on my laptop, and get paid by the client.
The project overall (for my involvement, anyway) lasted over a year. I'd say I got paid for the last 4 months for doing about a month's work.
Admin
OMG, I'm not the only one!
Admin
that's not a WTF, it's an HFS (Holy F'ing Sh*t)
Admin
I agree, I have a boring IT job and I tried making up projects, etc..but unless you can apply it to something real, it gets old real fast. And then yes, the boredom will suck the energy and motivation right out of you.
Admin
I _did_ spit up coffee on my keyboard (and lap). WTF?
Admin
How true... Minutes of panic when something forks up, combined with hours upon hours of tedium. So far I've taught myself PHP, some SQL, CSS, X/HTML and Javascript. Python, Ruby and Java are next on the list.
Ho hum.
Admin
or maybe a tiny windows app that does
for (;;)
{
mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF_MOVE,1,0,0,0);
mouse_event(MOUSEEVENTF_MOVE,-1,0,0,0);
Sleep(60000);
}
Admin
My last company was in death throws and I would have jumped ship if it hadn't been for a massive retention bonus. Since I worked for the corporate IT group, I was "forced" to work from home when the local office shut down. For three months I still got up every morning at 7 just to make sure I was logged into the VPN and showing as "active" on the corporate IM client. I would then eat breakfast, watch TV, and mostly play Civilization III. I quickly learned that a complete Civ III game lasted about 7 hours. I did have attend a daily conference call for about an hour, but that never interrupted the game.
Admin
Thank you, everyone.
This isn't my job, but I'm in the same boat. I'm really happy to hear that I'm not the only one.
I got here at 8am, and I've had literally nothing to do yet. It's almost 9:30.
Admin
i...wow...i...uh...holy crap...
Admin
Does anyone know to break free of this? This is EXACTLY what has happened to me. It just don't fucking care anymore. I sit here and surf the entire day. Occasionally I'll dream up a project that takes less than a couple days to finish, but you can only do that so much. The only work I do is putting out fires (usually password reset or some bullshit) and the odd custom report for someone.
Admin
when that happened to me i did two things. 1 started a massive personal project to keep my technical skills sharp and 2 started searching for a new job that would allow me to use those skills.
life is too short to sit around doing nothing even if you are getting paid for it.
Admin
And now for something completely different, my friend has once worked for a company, which has been running continuous monitoring of the mouse movement on all the workstations, so the top management alway knew, if someone was working or wasting time. I can´t say anthing fancy about their way around this, but it is a fact, that my friend still makes all kinds of weird movements with free hand, when reading a particularly interesting magazine
Admin
At many places, if you develop something at work/related at all to your work/with work tools/any combination of those three, the workplace is able to claim full ownership of the developed item, you are forced to sign all rights away to it, and you are forced to help develop it, at their discretion, to a marketable product. So creating some sort of charity project completely backfires.
Admin
I used to work customer service from 1:30 to 10 for a finance company which has since collapsed in disgrace after the misbehavior of the top brass became known to the stockholders. It was pretty busy until about suppertime, and then things would really slack off. Shortly before they went to Windows 95, the company became vicious about protecting productivity. When they realized that some of the customer service reps were playing Solitaire, they removed the shortcut. Being computer-savvy, I quickly showed the other reps how to find solitaire.exe on the hard drive. So they deleted that, but I found a spot where it was still on the network. They deleted that, and I brought in a floppy disk from home. I mean really, ANYTHING was better than staring out the window at the deserted evening streets of St Paul for an hour between calls.
When they went to Win95, they didn't bother removing the games, so we happily played Solitaire, Hearts, and Minesweeper. (I also took up needlecrafts about that time, and got a lot done.) But they did ban Internet useage, and even set up the firewall to reject all HTTP transactions. But it didn't block telnet, so I jus telnetted to my college account and used Lynx to surf the 'web. ;)
Boredom can be a great motivator for creativity.
Admin
Urban legend. I don't believe this one.
Admin
Love it!
Admin
We couldn't figure out how to re-enable this functionality (and make it last past the next re-boot). Nazi IT had disabled it.
Admin
Haha, I did the same thing at a summer job way back when. They didn't block Internet usage, but they did monitor it, so the telnet-Lynx trick was great.
Admin
Really? Who?
Admin
This one is actually pretty good.
Admin
Wow... That's handy. :) Thanks.
Admin
You make an assumption that they have an internet connection that actually lets them do anything. With that kind of resistance to movement, I would assume their net connection is so heavily filtered they can't even search on Google.
Admin
5 stars. Instant classic.
*standing ovation, when I can get up laughing all over the floor*
Admin
I have to disagree slightly.. I've BTDT as well and gotten nothing but trouble for trying to be at least slightly productive. Th micro-managing weasel I was forced to call a boss had a bad habit of looking over your shoulder constantly. This, in itself, was not so bad, but in typical PHB fashion, he would begin to question everything you did. And on those rare occassions when you had an actual assignment, he would complain about the color of the font, the size of the screen, etc. This was especially annoying when the complaints were about processes that were non-interactive. That's more than enough to sap every last bit of motivation...