I read posts about people quitting jobs because they’re boring or there is not much to do and I don’t get it: what’s wrong with being paid for doing nothing or not much at all?

Examples I can think of: being paid to be present but only working 30 minutes to 2 hours every 8 hours, or a job where you have to work 5 minutes every 30 minutes.

What’s wrong with reading a book, writing poetry or a novel, exercising, playing with the smartphone… and going home to enjoy your hobbies fully rested?

Am I missing something?

  • RussA
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    9 months ago

    Context switching is the reason why. There’s “downtime” where I work at because of the times I work (night time / I believe its called a “graveyard” shift). However, its never nothing for the whole shift, its intermittent. So lets say I decided to play a game (or work on a personal project, or any other number of things) I’d have to get into the mindset of whatever I’m doing, then see that a ticket has come in, switch my mindset back, answer the ticket and perform the work required for the ticket… and then switch back again.

    As @toomanypancackes said in their reply, I honestly just either want to go back to bed, or not have to worry about work and do my own thing (uninterrupted). Those aren’t options unfortunately, so I’m just left to be in that weird purgatory of “There’s not a lot of work to be done, but there’s some every so often… so I can’t completely go away”. I prefer it over it being absolutely slammed with tickets because that’s just exhausting.

    Every so often I’ll put on a rerun of a show since it doesn’t matter if I “get into” the show or not, but actually doing something significant isn’t usually an option unless its actually dead during my hours.