First days at work

Not only are they boring, but they’re damn tiring as well. Especially when you start work after a good period of doing nothing, it’s even more difficult. I think the main reason for this is that you’re not used to sitting in a single position for long, or for that matter, even short periods of time. At home, you’re more accustomed to the comfortable position of lying down horizontally after every 15 minutes of sitting, standing or walking (I won’t even mention running).

Few exciting things happen on first days. Firstly, your boss doesn’t want to dump work on you all at once, and then you also don’t know your co-workers well enough to be too friendly. And going through company manuals or orientation material isn’t my first choice for literature. Probably the most difficult thing is in trying to stay awake. You don’t want to show that you’re lazy, well not on the first day at least, so you battle hard to find something interesting to keep the subduing powers of sleep at bay.

One thing I sometimes do to fight boredom is to try and make different words on a calculator. For some reason I always end up with the same words and I don’t even see the point of trying, but somehow the whole thing gives me a kick every time.

Another thing I like to do on a calculator is to enter the value of pie to the 11th decimal place and then perform weird arithmetic functions on it. Again, it doesn’t really make sense, but I can spend a good 7-10 minutes doing that. Sometimes I also like to see how many calculations the calculator can take before giving an error message. Like for example, I will fill the screen with 9s and then add a 1 to see if the calculator will give an error and if it doesn’t I’ll keep on adding 1 or some other number until it finally succumbs.

If you have a computer without any internet, there’s little that you can do to keep yourself interested for long. But for some of us it can be a good tool for appearing to be busy. MS Excel is probably the most useful amongst the very basic software available to the everyday office worker. Just type in some random words, accompanied with some random numbers in a few columns and you’ve got something going. Writing something in MS Word may arouse the suspicion of your colleagues or your boss as people tend to look at what you’re typing. But no such thing ever happens when working on Excel. The thing is so damn boring that people try to keep themselves away from looking at the screen whenever an Excel spreadsheet is on.

The thing about the office is that when you don’t have any work, you wish you did to make time move faster, but when you do have some work, you wish that you didn’t so that you could just laze around and enjoy the scenery from your window (yes, I have a window). I guess it’s just another one of those things when you just can’t win.