I feel like an idle drone

On August 09 2011 23:46 Chill wrote:
Here's the thing about being an intern - it's work for them to give you work. Bring it up to your manager than you could use some extra work and then let it go. Use this time to work on yourself - read up about investing, plan vacations, pay your bills, etc. Basically use that idle time to take care of annoying tasks that you don't want to do on your free time. Welcome to the workforce.

On August 09 2011 23:15 Calm wrote:
There's enough on TL to kill a day. But when you say you can't use too much bandwidth, does that mean no watching streams?

On August 09 2011 23:06 gumshoe wrote:
You can do some writing while your there, any story ideas?

On August 09 2011 23:40 endy wrote:
Enjoy it while it lasts. If you want this company to hire you, then talk frankly with your manager and say that you would like more assignments. If you don't care, then simply enjoy doing nothing. I'd love to have more time doing nothing.

On August 09 2011 23:46 Chill wrote:
Here's the thing about being an intern - it's work for them to give you work. Bring it up to your manager than you could use some extra work and then let it go. Use this time to work on yourself - read up about investing, plan vacations, pay your bills, etc. Basically use that idle time to take care of annoying tasks that you don't want to do on your free time. Welcome to the workforce.

On August 09 2011 23:43 OpticalShot wrote:
I have a lot to do and I'm on TL anyways =P completely unrestricted internet usage FTW. I also have WMP running with songs from my phone, and Teamspeak.

As long as I get my stuff done, get my hours done (I do about 44 hours per week to cover up for my rookie-ness plus my browsing time), I'm good with that (it doesn't hurt my conscience). I hope my managers are ok with that too =)

Sometimes though I'm forced offline because our office IT guy is installing something massive on my computer that requires admin access, so I'm logged off. As a solution, I recently started sketching house layouts for Sims 2 so I can build it at home... just an idea for you. Definitely looks like I'm doing useful work and I find it fun.

On August 10 2011 00:39 Darkdeath3 wrote:

You forgot the best use of time of all, looking for a so called "real" job. Thers nothing like looking for your future employment while getting paid to do so.

On August 10 2011 00:56 lolsixtynine wrote:
This sounds like exactly what I've been doing for the last 6 weeks. >_> Reddit is very useful if you don't have anything to do. Also, practicing skills for your job (obviously very job-dependent) is a good way to stay productive and make the time go by faster.

On August 10 2011 00:40 Noe wrote:
I'm an on-site technician and I can only work if there is any problems... Everyone is on vacation, giving me about six hours of spare time each day. It's actually increasing in the amount of work week by week, but still.

I bring my laptop and do offline stuff I enjoy, as coding, drawing, playing random console games through an emulator. I'd actually go nuts without it. tt I also browse a lot of TL on the work computer, There isn't much you can do though.

On August 10 2011 01:47 neSix wrote:
Or use your free time to read about and study topics that interest you... Programming, photography, science... just do a lot of reading of HowStuffWorks.com

On August 10 2011 01:43 Djagulingu wrote:
A little more about myself, I'm a student who finished soph year and is doing a summer practice. So, I'll be returning to school anyway. And I live with my family, so they pay the bills and my vacations are already planned.


Yes, that means, no streams. Sadly enough, my internet at the company can't handle streams but gives no problems in youtube.


I'd probably blog about that instead of this if i had one. Or I might have blogged them both. I don't know.


Besides the fact that I'd absolutely love to get hired by them, I also want to work rather than stay idle.


I'll probably do that.


I wish I had a lot to do too. Yesterday, I literally had a lot (they gave me and the other intern a big chunk of work for the week, she worked only hard enough so that we both will finish the work in 3 days if I worked at the same speed, but HELL NO. It was over and even we did double checks before 6 pm. Another intern that is on a relevant project said that we could spread things out for the week, I was naively thinking that they could give us more stuff after seeing that the work is done.

But instead, what we did was fixing some little details that took half an hour after the slow working intern fucked up the whole stuff. I first BM'd her by saying that we have to do stupid stuff that we already did just because of her careless actions, but later I was thankful because that was more work as the original thing would take my 5 worthless minutes without the fuckup.

I spent my rest of the day grinding battle tower in pokemon emerald. Or rather battle factory (I like the luck factor in battle factory). I even stopped hiding the fact that I play pokemon in the work. I'm like "what? am I going to pretend to be doing a non-existing work? I'm playing pokemon and if you're not happy with that fact, give me some work".


I'm still a student, so I'm not looking for a full time job. Part time jobs are total different story though. My current company doesn't have part time positions though. Shit.


Wow, reddit is browsable? I mean, I find the site completely opposite of what I call browsable, because both content-wise and architecture-wise, the site is a dump. And you reminded me to mail myself my C++ e-book. Thanks.


And I'm an on-desk internee and I can only work when a pig starts flying. At least 90 out of 110 people in the company are not on vacation but that still gives me about 7 to 8 hours of free time on an average day.

I play pokemon at work and I'd probably go nuts without it too. I read every single post in the LR threads just to see what the fuck is going on and after reading LR threads for the games of that day, I browse every single other thread, blog, news and whatever. It just gets increasingly boring over time, and by increasingly, I mean it increases in an exponential pattern. The fact that all the internetz think that I'm from germany (not even close lol, I'm from a middle eastern country that shares its name with a bird and I work at the same country, guess which one it is).

Coding, well. I tried that, but I don't know what to code. So, I gave up. Coding shares the same fate as writing a story. I don't know what to. "Let's make my code write a variable. Let's make it write a variable from a class by using set and get. Now let's make a class interface, write source code for the class whose interface i constructed and make my code write the same variable." zzzzz. That's what I've ever done with coding. I want to code something that makes sense too. What should I code. Damn it.

On August 10 2011 02:57 Horuku wrote:
I'm in the same boat. First internship this summer (continuing into the fall) at a software development company and I've spent a lot of time being idle and doing nothing.

I've passed it by surfing team liquid, researching all the parts for a new computer build, and doing research for my music production. I have asked my bosses for more to do and they're like "SORRY GOT NOTHING" pretty much saying I can do whatever.

On August 10 2011 02:58 Denzil wrote:


Watch Day9 dailies from youtube or blip or whatever he uses now.

On August 10 2011 03:58 ZaloMonkada wrote:
I have the same problem, even the bandwidth cap o.o After reading all the tl posts in the last like 2 month, I ended up just reading girl blogs from 2 years ago (those were so much more entertaining haha)

Edit: ask your boss if you can bring in an mp3 player! thats what i did a week ago ^_^

On August 10 2011 05:36 Horuku wrote:
Lol, well at least you have freedom to slack off. Even though I have nothing to do I still don't like being caught watching videos by people walking by.

On August 10 2011 06:02 marttorn wrote:
And you feel bad about being an idle drone? Consider your options:

A. Go back and forth over and over again mining minerals/gas

B. Get roasted by a hellion

C. Become a building and FUCKING DIE.

Yeah, being idle isn't so bad now is it!

On August 10 2011 08:51 SarR wrote:
I wish I could get paid for doing nothing.

On August 10 2011 09:06 aphorism wrote:


Sort of random, but if you want some interesting coding problems and you like math, check out Project Euler. It's what i've been doing in my boring internship downtime. Google Code Jam is in the same vein, and a search for "programming challenges" would probably give many more results.