A wise and benevolent ad campaign for a local service provider in the area says, “The Internet is no place for wasting time, except it totally is.” It goes by many names: Wasting time, procrastination, burning minutes, dicking around. However you refer to it, this is a time honored tradition in the work-place. In retail, you'll find people frequently ignoring customers and conversing with one-another. In fast-food it's the classic elementary-school day-dreaming. When you grow up though, you get a big-boy's tool: The Webernets!
Now don't get all excited there, cowboy. You can't just log into 4chan willy-nilly. I can guarantee your office probably has a block on what parts of the interwebs you can see and what parts you cannot. It's a game of cat and mouse – you want to screw around and they don't want you to screw around... At least on paper. Ten bucks says the IT guys who set up those blocks are going to those websites themselves. Tell me I'm wrong. I dare you.
There are a few simple tips and tricks to goofing off in the workplace that I – the great sage Stranger – can help you with. Just follow my lead and try not to get caught – and this brings us to tip number 1!
DON'T GET CAUGHT.
I kno
w this seems pretty obvious, but it's worth stressing again. Seriously. Don't do it. One of these days you're going to get cocky and it's going to cost you your job. You have to be prepared to do just enough work to still appear to be a normal functioning member of the company – it's a farce of course because no one is a normal functioning member of the company, but it's the price you have to pay in order to get paid to surf.
What can you do to avoid getting caught? Well, first off, rearrange your desk. Sure, having the mon
itor in the center and facing straight will keep you from getting a neck crick, but you have to suffer to slack off! What kind of pansy are you, anyway? My suggestion is to occlude the view of your monitor as much as possible so that any management walking down the aisle will have to work to see your screen. Put the monitor on the aisle side of your desk and pivot it to face you... No – pivot it more. MORE! There. Good.
The next thing you can do is pretty simple, but this one is optional. There are purveyors of fine rear view mirrors intended for office use that you can purchase. I've seen them put to good use, and I've even seen a few ge
niuses use normal
mirrors with the excuse that they were using it to periodically check their makeup. Good on you, mate. The only downside is that everyone pretty obviously knows what these mirrors are for, and the manager viewed in them is closer than they appear. In order to prevent arousing too much suspicion, I've personally forgone their use.
Mind the tags!
In your sojourns through this great net of ours you'll frequently find that people have been kind enough to put a little note as to the nature of the contents of their post – most especially on websites like LiveJournal and Fark. The most important tag to bear in mind is NSFW. You probably know what this means by now, but it bears stressing: Not Safe For Work. Ever. I don't care where you work, and I don't care how tantalizing it is. If Megan Fox is within, and you've been dying to see her boobs since the day of your birth (And how exactly did you manage to get a job, if you did? You've got to be like... what... Three? Four?) I don't care how desperate you are to taste the forbidden fruit – I am forbidding them!! Wait until you get home, Holmes, and skeeve away. You will get fired.
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But seriously... Use your head
Not everything is going to be so kindly tagged for you. Sometimes you just have to use your own judgment and steer clear when you think a place is gonna get your slaughtered. An anecdote
– it's an extreme case but it's true. A man was once fired from my benevolent company for possession of improper pictures he was downloading to his workstation – Porn to be
exact. I say this is an extreme case because... well... it was a lot of porn. He had around 30g of jubblies, wubblies, and grubblies in all manner of pose and position. If you can't pull the thought, “
Gee, porn might get me canned!” from your the ether in your skull, then maybe you should just put your nose to the grindstone and get back to work because you're clearly too stupid to be here. For those of you who can draw that distinction there are other shades of gray as well – be careful of some of the more tame
stuff, be careful for anything blatantly racist or
sexist. Companies are getting more and more scared of lawsuit now and so they crack down on these offenses almost disproportionately. I'm not saying racism and sexism aren't a big deal – they're huge – I'm just saying that even small comments could land you at home with a pint of ice cream you can no longer afford in your lap to give you comfort.
All mah websites is blocked!!
It's pretty common for companies to have an extensive list of sites blocked thanks to blocking out certain meta-tags. This means you'll probably have to get a little creative with where you go for your community and entertainment. An additional hardship comes in that most companies also block personal email, and I can guarantee you don't want this stuff linked to your work email – that'll always come back to you in a bad way.
This means you'll have to do a little homework when you're going about this. Below I'll give some good websites that probably aren't blocked at your place of “business” but what this means for you is that you'll have to sign up for them at home when you have access to your personal email accounts. If you really just don't want to do this any time but during work-hours just take a field trip back home during your lunch-break and sign up then... Big baby.
4-a) All those shiny websites!
Amazon – OK, sure, It's that place where you go to buy pretty much anything. It's like the Wal-Mart of the internet – Ok, Walmart.com is the Wal-Mart of the internet so it's more like the... No they have a website too. It's where you go to buy shit. But DID you know they have communities as well? You might have to dig around for them, but for the geek who is drifting in a sea of boredom at work they have a lot of places to find entertainment. Just mind the trolls... They're everywhere. Some highlights include the Video Game Forums (Called the VGF by the locals), the Gold Box Forum, as well as Health, Politics, and Religion. Beware of the last three – the locals are wild.
Fark – This place is part community party news site. They'll connect you in to all the news ever. They specialize in the weird and the unusual. As a link dump you'll find some pretty fun articles to pass the day, but better yet they have a strong community of commentators who will be happy to rip apart anything posted. Even if you don't participate, reading the comments section itself can be rewarding.
LiveJournal – This got mention earlier. If you don't know, this is one of the grandaddies of the blogging movement, personal journals available for free for years and years. It started out a little exclusive, but quickly opened its borders to all kinds of digital immigrant. You can do more than just whine about how your white-male-middle-class existence is the pits. LJ actually harbors a thriving family of communities for nearly anything under the sun. If you're a fan of wank and drama, some real highlights can be the Stupid_Free groups and nearly anything tagged OTND (Oh No they Didn't!).
Honorable Mentions – You won't find much in the way of community at the following websites, but they're amazing for wasting hours on the internet. First up is Wikipedia and Tvtropes.org – great places to take what I call “Vision Quests” of the internet. Pick an article at random and keep following the interesting links to see what new stuff you learn. Next up is your local news station. These can be less exciting, but as with Fark the comments section will be largely why you stick around. As always, just mind the crazies.
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