Quoted from timab2000:Did your employer hire you to look at Pinside as part of your job??? If not I do not blame them. Spot screwing around and do what they hired you to do.
I read you post. And reread it. Then read it again. Aren't you guilty of making several rather heroic assumptions here?
1) You don't know what his employer hired him to do.
2) You don't know if he is an hourly wage slave or a salary man.
3) You have no idea what standards and restrictions he works under.
4) Is he a production worker or is he sitting behind a desk? You don't know because you did not ask.
You made that fatal mistake of assuming. Of assuming everyone lives like you. Assuming everyone has a job like yours.
When I was a kid I worked in a fast food joint. If we were not serving hamburgers we were constantly wiping down the counter to look busy. That's what the boss wanted. We could have stood there with our arms crossed until the next customer walked in and would have been just as productive but the boss wanted to see "busy" work.
My girlfriend works in a hospital lab. Sometimes they are covered up with patients getting blood tests and all sort of things a lab does for sick people. Other times there are no patients and not a damn thing to a lab tech to do. There is a custodial staff that mops the floors. There is a maintenance staff to change out the light bulbs. So, no patients equals downtime. When your job is what comes across your desk and nothing is coming across your desk what would you suggest a person doing a job like my girlfriend supposed to do? Is she supposed to start wiping down the counters so the boss can see that she is "busy"? She is doing what she was hired to do. If the work is not there, by your standards, what is she supposed to do? Look at an empty screen on the computer that sits on her desk?
EDIT: I almost forget this: My brother-in-law used to work for a pipeline that pumps gas to your hot water heater. His job was the compressor station where four huge diesel engines compressed the gas and pushed it through the pipes. His job was to monitor the valves and switches and gates to make sure all was well. He had to make the rounds once an hour which involved turning his chair around and looking at some brass weights that actually did the work.
He was a regular customer of the city library. When I went to visit him one time he had six books stacked up to read. All on the company's dime.
But there were those other times when one of those huge diesels would fail and for the next three days it was balls to the wall repairing 25% of your compressing power. Or a gas line would collapse and it would be a crew out digging up a blown pipe and replacing it and working all day and all night until the job was done.