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9 - 5 slavery...
Aug. 7th, 2010 05:36 pmThis week, I have mostly been enduring endless hours of tedium on behalf of a company's profit margin. An activity which, I am told, is often referred to as 'work'. This is apparently something which people who do not have a vocation to make the world a better place by stressing themselves into an early grave attempting to explain scientific fundamentals to kids who only want to know how the sex organs work (and then only in a practical sense) do to both pass the time and earn money.
Last week I got a call from a temp agency I'd vaguely flung my CV at in the hope something would stick. They wanted someone for a week at an Insurance company doing basic data entry style stuff. They were offering money for this so, despite said money being a third of what I normally earn for 'advanced babysitting' of, I agreed.
I was expecting a version of hell. I was expecting an office designed on the sweatshop model of office design with people crammed into little cubicles. I was expecting micromanagement. I was expecting tedium and monotony. I was expecting a bossy woman with a whip and someone with a drum beating out a time. It may be that I read too many Dilbert cartoons...
Instead it was fun and enjoyable. My job was to transfer data from surveyor reports to an online system so that clients could read it and take appropriate actions. That bit was a little tedious and repetitive but not as bad as I was expecting because there was also lots of meaty problems to solve as well. None of these particularly taxed my intellect more than, say, the average episode of Murder She Wrote but they stopped complete brain death from lack of use. What made it more fun was the stroke to my ego. They had a back log, it seemed insurmountable. I started work on it and quickly cleared said backlog. This may have something to do with the fact I had no other distractions (all the annoying phone calls and e-mails were being handled by colleagues...) and also due to the fact that I got a lot of practise in cutting and pasting quickly and accurately when writing briefs for LRP events...
It was also relaxing to know that, at the end of the day, I would not have several hours of work to do in preparation for the next day... in pretty much every job I have done to date (both working in teaching and science research) there has been an element of 'unpaid overtime at home' to deal with. Usually this is self motivated because of aforementioned 'vocations'.
There is also a chance I may get invited back there which would be cool. It was a very good working environment there. A flexitime policy that was efficiently and sensibly applied, everyone feeling more like valued employees and so on. This would be nice because I do need more work to tide me over until I start placement in September (allegedly).
ION, am now looking forward to Odyssey...
Also, I may have a nice site for Waypoint and so am more inclined to actually motivate myself into organising something... I will post more when I know it...
Last week I got a call from a temp agency I'd vaguely flung my CV at in the hope something would stick. They wanted someone for a week at an Insurance company doing basic data entry style stuff. They were offering money for this so, despite said money being a third of what I normally earn for 'advanced babysitting' of, I agreed.
I was expecting a version of hell. I was expecting an office designed on the sweatshop model of office design with people crammed into little cubicles. I was expecting micromanagement. I was expecting tedium and monotony. I was expecting a bossy woman with a whip and someone with a drum beating out a time. It may be that I read too many Dilbert cartoons...
Instead it was fun and enjoyable. My job was to transfer data from surveyor reports to an online system so that clients could read it and take appropriate actions. That bit was a little tedious and repetitive but not as bad as I was expecting because there was also lots of meaty problems to solve as well. None of these particularly taxed my intellect more than, say, the average episode of Murder She Wrote but they stopped complete brain death from lack of use. What made it more fun was the stroke to my ego. They had a back log, it seemed insurmountable. I started work on it and quickly cleared said backlog. This may have something to do with the fact I had no other distractions (all the annoying phone calls and e-mails were being handled by colleagues...) and also due to the fact that I got a lot of practise in cutting and pasting quickly and accurately when writing briefs for LRP events...
It was also relaxing to know that, at the end of the day, I would not have several hours of work to do in preparation for the next day... in pretty much every job I have done to date (both working in teaching and science research) there has been an element of 'unpaid overtime at home' to deal with. Usually this is self motivated because of aforementioned 'vocations'.
There is also a chance I may get invited back there which would be cool. It was a very good working environment there. A flexitime policy that was efficiently and sensibly applied, everyone feeling more like valued employees and so on. This would be nice because I do need more work to tide me over until I start placement in September (allegedly).
ION, am now looking forward to Odyssey...
Also, I may have a nice site for Waypoint and so am more inclined to actually motivate myself into organising something... I will post more when I know it...
