I’ve never had an office job and I’ve always wondered what it is a typical cubicle worker actually does in their day-to-day. When your boss assigns you a “project”, what kind of stuff might it entail? Is it usually putting together some kind of report or presentation? I hear it’s a lot of responding to emails and attending meetings, but emails and meetings about what, finances?
I know it’ll probably be largely dependent on what department you work in and that there are specific office jobs like data-entry where you’re inputting information into a computer system all day long, HR handles internal affairs, and managers are supposed to delegate tasks and ensure they’re being completed on time. But if your job is basically what we see in Office Space, what does that actually look like hour-by-hour?
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way my boss can’t see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I’d probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
The thing is, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s just that I just don’t care. It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now, if I work my ass off and the company ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime. So where’s the motivation? And here’s another thing,I have eight different bosses right now!
So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my real motivation - is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job, but y’know, it will only make someone work hard enough not to get fired.
Now they are trying to offer me some kind of stock option and equity sharing program? I have a meeting tomorrow where I am probably going to be laid off.
Holy shit, it’s been forever since I’ve seen this and… that’s me now. When I don’t work from home, that’s exactly what I do. My office has a little room for privacy, so I’ll just go lay in there randomly for a while. I take 15-20 minute shits multiple times a day. I listen to podcasts all day, or watch videos. When I work from home, I’m usually in bed chilling for 7+ hours a day.
I do between “the most work of all of my coworkers in a day” and “as much as everyone else combined” and it’s completely fucking bonkers. I haven’t had a day in months where I didn’t do the most stuff out of anyone.
What field?? Like what are you supposed to be doing instead of watching videos for 7 hours. It’s crazy to me that so much time can be wasted without a manager realising or caring…
Oh it’s insane. I work for a nonprofit, doing basic database management. My manager is… interesting. It’s a small team. Two of my coworkers are good, they do about as much as I do. Two coworkers do nothing at all.
Like legit, we can quantify the work we do. I’ll do 30-50 work per day, staying in bed for seven hours. The two bad coworkers will, even working in the office, do 8-12 work per day.
Our manager has started to cover doing work for those two. Our manager does 20-30 work per day.
It’s a fucking bonkers job. But on the weeks I’m at comes it’s AWESOME. Being in the office is shit, and the two bad coworkers make it worse. I have a group chat with the people who do good work and we lament about the bad workers. It’s kinda toxic, I guess. But at least I get to chill a lot and the pay isn’t bad.
You better hope the Bobs don’t come through your place of work looking to make changes.
Oh it’s insane. They spent like 10-20k USD to have us audited and they were like “you need better or more people” and NOTHING CHANGED
I HAD SO MUCH HOPE
You must be living in the Twilight Zone at this point.
You could not be more correct.
You’re just a straight shooter, with upper management written all over you.
Decided to go back to school to go something more meaningful, but that was what my first job basically was. I was hybrid, though. So I was working from home pretty often too, and I lived 10 minutes from the office so I would come in late and leave early on those in person days too. Sometimes I’d spend an hour writing a script and pretend it took me like 2 weeks.