Does Anyone Do Any Work Around Here?

I have an office job. Well, it’s a student job in an office setting, and needless to say it’s pretty dull. Let’s just call it the “Department of Bureaucratic Processes”. At the DOBP, I maintain the position of “web associate”, idly awaiting orders from the higher-ups when something goes awry with the tangled mess of madness they call their website. The University for which this department belongs is a lumbering behemoth of a bureaucracy, and its unresponsive, slow-moving poise seems to have been inherited into the DOBP like its bastard offspring.

So here is my work day if I’m lucky; Fix a few broken links on some horribly buried hypertext that no one can find, contemplate doing a CSS redesign of this ancient collection of garbage (quickly correcting this overly idealistic thought with a more realistic one, like jumping off a building), and then resigning to working on personal projects or reading FARK.

I often wonder what people did in offices before the Internet. Did they work? Most likely not. As I walk down the brightly lit corridors of my basement office building I can only observe what seems to be a multi-million dollar internet surfing faction. Idly wasting the hours with blogs, BBC news, and other random crap. With this seemingly exponential increase in the speed at which people communicate, you would think that a correlative increase in workplace productivity would be observed. Apparently not, in fact I believe quite the opposite is true. They say that the average programmer only produces twelve lines of working code per day. I say the average programmer gets up to date on the latest software for their mobile phone, browses for new wallpaper for their desktop, reads their favorite news sites, and then sits down and tries to focus on twelve lines of code.

I find that I am immensely more productive when working on things I actually care about, like freelance projects and personal web apps. So when I see all these Master’s Degree holding scientists sitting in offices staring at a computer screen, I begin to question the value of going to college and getting a degree. To get a job? Hurray.

Time to get back to work.