I got yelled at for surfing the web too much at work. Well, that isn’t entirely accurate. My boss told D., the team lead, to talk to me about it. D.’s opinion was basically that as long as my work is getting done (which it is, he verified), he didn’t think that it was really a problem. That everyone reads things at work and I was kind of unfortunate to sit right in front of my boss.
The tag-team approach is sort of irksome, but I guess I do see the advantage to playing good cop/bad cop. My boss doesn’t need to have much to do with me on a day to day basis (in terms of work, I mean….we sit three feet apart) and the team lead does, so it makes sense to let him take my side. He’s pretty sincere too. He said she’s brought it up in the past and this is the first time he’s said anything to me, so maybe he really does see my side of it.
I think this is a fairly common issue, and though I can’t speak for others, I can say with some certainty why it comes up for me:
The first is work style. In college, there were some people who could sit in the library all day on Sunday with one food break and a couple of email checks. I've never been a worker bee like that. I’ll work for an hour and then watch an episode of the Simpsons. Work for another hour, put away my laundry. I think I'm effective at this for two reasons – I get bored easily and I work quickly compared to the average bear. Call it arrogant or simply confident, but through 17 years of school including college, I would be willing to bet I took fewer than ten tests where I wasn't first or second in the class to finish.
There's also, of course, the obvious - that is, that the job isn't particularly challenging or stimulating. I do bring some baggage to this, coming from three years of prior work experience with not enough to do. Unfortunately, that really reinforces the habit of finding, shall we say, extra-curricular activities to augment your job. With this job, if I really dug around, I might be able to find enough work to occupy 40+ hours/week, but there's still the problem of the tasks themselves. Some of the client relations stuff is kind of fun, but a typical project otherwise might be receiving a list of 150 funds and logging into the system to put a period at the end of each fund name so we don't have a duplicate issue when we combine the two databases. I'd be a little suspicious of the imagination and maybe even intelligence of anyone who could worker bee that.
So you need a little entertainment. Everyone does. My boss is not a web surfer, I've noticed. But Tina stops by her cube to talk about Britney Spears' latest legal troubles, Pete stops by to talk about how much he drank over the weekend, she talks to her parents, makes restaurant reservations....and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. There isn't. I'm more of a loner and I check espn.com for the ALCS preview and read the NYTimes Magazine instead. If the work's done, the work's done. That's all I'm saying.
(I realize there's some rationalization in here. And perhaps the most important outcome is that this isn't the career for me either. But it's not a terrible job, and perhaps it will open up something else.)
1 comment:
There are certain jobs that particularly lend themselves to a certain amount of free time, where accomplishing the task by a particular time with a reasonable amount of quality is important. Less relevant is performing a constant amount of work to get to that point.
Everyone needs breaks, and obviously it is of great concern if you do 30 minutes of subpar work, and 7.5 hours of browsing or chit chatting. But a better question would be if you are doing pretty solid work, and have some free time your boss' boss should really be asking "Hey, maybe this is too easy for her, and we need to give her more challenging stuff and delegate the worker bee stuff to someone else" rather than "Every time Tina comes by to chit chat with me, I think I always see her on the internet."
Post a Comment